Naruko: Explosion Chronicles!
by KaiserKou
Summary: Naruko, being a tomboy as she is, returns to Konoha after three years of training with Jiraiya. Her home, and the people there, are the same as ever, excepting one young man... a man whose love for her has always been beyond reason. But she is not the same either, for she returns to the Leaf with a strange new power within her: Bakuton, the Explosion Release!
1. Homecoming! A Heroine Returns!

**A/N:** So, I found this little thing laying around in the recesses of my computer. Turns out I've got more than two hundred pages of unused Naruto material and concepts… How about that? So I cleaned it up, added and edited for about half an hour, and here I give it to you: _Naruko – Bakuden!_ (Explosion Tales!)

 ***EDITED***

If you guys like it, I might write another chapter… We'll just have to see, huh?

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Chapter 1: Homecoming! A Hero Returns!

* * *

"So, you're telling me that the jinchuriki of Kyuubi no Kitsune, the saviour of this village" Izumo asked slowly, his brow furrowed in confusion "is a girl?"

Kotetsu, the other of the two guards who were stationed at the open gates into Konohagakure no sato on that beautiful spring day, made a sound that was half-way between a sigh and a gnash and put his palm to his face in frustration. "Listen, you were hit with some kind of memory-altering Genjutsu" he explained for what felt like the squintillionth time that day "and it altered key details in your memory, okay? You just have to get used to the fact that some things are different from what you remember".

"Like what?" came the question, to which Kotetsu shot him a pointed look. "Obviously the gender of the main character... I mean hero! Hero of Konoha!" he shook his head hard to clear it. "But other than their gender, what would have changed?"

"Okay, let me humour you" Kotetsu sighed again. "How about the rest of team seven? The Haruno girl and that traitor scum Uchiha?"

"Well, Naruto – what Naruko was called – was in love with Haruno chan, who was in love with Sasuke, and Naruto had this fierce rivalry with Uchiha, while Hatake-senpai was pretty apathetic about it all. Wait" his eyes flashed wide "don't tell me-"

"No, that isn't reversed here" he said and lifted a finger to itch under the bandage that was tied around the middle of his face and over the bridge of his nose. "But things're… more complicated. Sasuke and Naruko-chan had this rivalry you speak of, but as far as I can tell Sakura-san considered Naruko-chan an enemy for most of their time together, and Naruko-chan didn't seem to love her. She just ignored the girl, for the most part… I think".

"I see" Izumo nodded, a little sad at that. Naruto's persistent and unreciprocated adoration for the disciple of Tsunade was one of his more endearing qualities in the reality he was used to.

"But the Uchiha" Kotetsu went on and frowned hard, his look going distant as an uneasy feeling came into his stomach. "At their fight at the Valley of the End… only Hokage-sama knows what really happened, but it had to be something bad. Naruko-chan just wasn't the same after that happened. She said she was glad that the Uchiha was gone, for she said she wanted nothing to do with a village that kept, and I quote 'people like that sick bastard' in high regards".

"Did he…?" Izumo wondered, the final words of that question stuck on his tongue. The thought… it was too horrid to give voice to.

"I don't know. Maybe that's best, but I can tell you this: whatever it was that made Naruko-chan so sad, the traitor deserves to die for it!" A sharp clearing of a voice broke their discussion, and the two looked up from their sentry-box at the immediate inside of the gates to see two strangers. "Gossip about someone and their shadow will appear" Kotetsu grumbled while Izumo stared. "Welcome back" he stood up and bowed "Naruko-chan, Jiraya-sama. I see that you've changed your hair".

"Yeah" Uzumaki Naruko shrugged her slender shoulders, her hair once put up in two pigtails high on the sides of her head now cascading freely and wavy down her graceful spine to be tied together with a single silk band halfway down its waist-long length. She had grown taller than she was before, if not much, still short and sort of stocky, but her build seemed to have matured and grown much curvier and slender all at once, her skin still tanned to a brilliant contrast with her bright blue eyes. But the most different about her was her attire. She had shed the jumpsuit she had always worn as a child and traded it in for a pair of orange fatigue trousers with white linen wrappings over both knees and a black sleeveless top cut so that it exposed her entire fishnet-armour-mesh clad midriff. Over it all she had slung a short-sleeved red coat with a black flame pattern along the hemline that reached almost to her sandal-clad feet, and over the back of it was her name, written in fierce and burning kanji. Her hitai-ite was polished to a mirror shine where it was tied around her forehead, and she wore a cocky smirk on her lips. "Whatta'bout it?"

"Couldn't you talk more womanly, for just once?" Jiraiya sighed from beside his student, deep and dark rings beneath his eyes. He seemed tired, the skin hanging looser on his frame than before, and his skin was paler as if he had not gotten enough sleep to sustain him. "Just once? For me?"

"Shut up, ero-sennin" she rolled her eyes at him and looked back to the two guards. "What'cha staring at" she looked to Izumo "perv?"

"Don't be too harsh on him; he thought you were a guy" Kotetsu apologised on behalf of his friend without even the slightest attempt to explain what he meant by it and moved onto the business at hand. "Papers, please".

"Yeah, whatever" she replied with a glare directed at Izumo and pulled out a small scroll from the one of the pouches in the black utility belt that was slung around her narrow waist, handing it to the sentry along with Jiraiya's own identification.

"Inuzuka Jiraiya-sama of the Sannin, Jōnin, with apprentice Uzumaki Naruko, Gennin" Kotetsu looked over their papers before pulling out a stamp and ink and marking both their scroll's already cluttered margins with the seal of Konoha in red ink. "Welcome home" he smiled at them both and bowed they took them without a word and left with merely a wave. He shot a look at his friend, who was still staring mouth agape at what was now empty air, and promptly growled and smacked him on the back of the head. "Idiot!"

"You're thinking about him, aren't you?" Jiraiya asked his student in a low tone as they made their way into town, his tone serious and his look hard. He had spent three years with the girl he had come to think of as a granddaughter, and he had come to know her moods very well. She was silent and outwardly walked carelessly and easily, but he could see the tension in her eyes and knew that her smirk was false.

"Everyone keeps talking about that bastard-attebayo" she let her smile slip into a snarl as a shudder went through her. "Always, always they talk about him, even now!"

"No, they were talking about you and about how they acknowledge you" Jiraiya told her firmly as they went, their voices low as to deter anyone who wished to listen in. "They spoke out of concern for you. And their adoration of the Uchiha brat turned to hatred long ago".

"Sure" she snorted and exhausted that subject firmly, not wishing to speak about it anymore. But he knew she needed to.

"Do you hate him?" he asked her softly, and in her mind those spiteful words spoken three years earlier rang out again, as they often did in her nightmares.

 _I'll make you bear my children, you impudent whore_!

"No" she acknowledged slowly, hesitantly, forcing the memories out of her mind. "I- I don't. I can't hate him, because I understand him, and in a different time, a different world, he could be me". Light and dark, good and evil, love and hate, ying and yang – nothing in the world was without counterpart, and she had always known, deep down, she had been born into that body at that time in that village to be his opposite. "But I don't think I'll ever be able to forgive him".

"For what he said, for what he almost did, I would have hated him" Jiraiya spoke to her in a tone that told her it was okay to weep, it was okay to rage and scream and howl at the sky. She hated it.

"He didn't rape me or anything, and, well, I don't" she shrugged, thinking that the sage didn't know everything. After all, some secrets were hers alone to keep. "You know what? I think I'll go up ahead, see if I can see any of my friends around here somewhere" she said and bounded away without further ado, leaping up onto the rooftops of Konoha before climbing the top of a flagpole in a sprint. Down below Jiraiya shook his head sadly before he turned towards the Hokage tower in the distance and made his way there, hanging his head as he walked. He had many things to tell Tsunade, and very little of the news he brought was good.

Naruko, in the meanwhile, regarded the village now below her with a growing smile, thoughts of the past put far out of her mind as she beheld her home for the first time in forever. The great faces carved into the far mountain seemed to smile at her as the sun warmed on her back through her coat, and she threw her arms wide and closed her eyes in a smile as she embraced the summer wind. Her ire from before forgotten she felt joy bubble in her breast. "Everyone!" she announced loudly to the village. "Uzumaki Naruko has returned! Yosh!"

"Naruko-neesan!" came a squeak of a voice from down below, and she looked down at the ground to see a small group of people coming towards her in a run. Grinning like a fool she jumped down in a single leap and landed with feline grace on her feet, looking at the three that ran at her first with cries of "Oyabun!" and "Oneesan!"

"Konohamaru! Moegi! Udon!" she exclaimed as the three children, taller than she remembered them being and now wearing Hitai-ite around their brows, betraying the fact that they were now formally adults and Shinobi, thudded into her and embraced her all at once. "Hey, watch it!" she protested at first as the three hugged her all as one, but she couldn't help but to feel warm inside, and so she laid a hand upon Konohamaru's and Moegi's heads. "Yare yare, you've gotten so big, all of you".

"We've missed you, Naruto-nee!" Konohamaru was almost sobbing with happy tears streaming down his face. "It's been so boring without you!"

"Don't you worry, my little kappa" she pushed them away from her and knelt down until she was at face-height with all of them "I'll make sure you become the best Shinobi in all of your class-attebayo. Neesan is back, and she'll have lots of time to hang about with all of you-attebayo" she grinned at them.

"Oneesan!" Moegi cried and threw her arms around her neck, holding her close. Naruko might have seen Konohamaru as a little brother and apprentice, but Moegi worshiped the very ground she walked on and regarded her as her role model in life. "Okaieri!"

"Tadaima" she ruffled her hair smoothly and looked up as someone chuckled. "S-Sakura-chan?"

"Welcome home, Naruko-chan" Tsuande's apprentice inclined her head as Naruok stood up, and they looked each other over as people and friends that had not seen each other in ages often do. "It's been a while, hasn't it?" To any other observer Haruno Sakura had changed quite a bit since her younger days. She had grown taller, cheeks gaunter and sharper, become slender of body and soft of skin, and her attire had changed to become more practical but also more revealing, and she wore gloves over her hands now to cover the hardened knuckles she had gotten from smashing apart boulders and trees with naught by savage strength and restrained fury.

Still, to Naruko's eyes, she looked just the same as always. "My, you've grown up, haven't you?" Sakura put her hands on her hips. "Become all womanly and stuff… I'm a bit jealous. What about me, Naruko-chan? Do you think I've grown up?"

Naruko looked closely at her and felt the warm comfort of friendship settle in her gut. There was friendship and… nothing else. Inwardly she flinched at that. Where had the… had that passed? But what she had felt for Sakura had been such a big part of who she really was that… damn it all, it was too confusing, it made her head hurt. "Nah, you look the same as ever, Sakura-chan".

Sakura's eyebrow twitched dangerously, her mirth turning to annoyance. "You bitch" she grumbled quietly, and Naruko chuckled nervously at having woken the cherry tree demon of Konoha.

"Na, na, Sakura-chan" Naruko gestured widely and tried to placate her. "No need to get testy! I really like your hair! What shampoo do you use? It's a very… pink! Tell me, is that your natural hair colour-"

"Naruko-nee!" Konohamaru complained as two other familiar shinobi came walking down the street from the other direction and began to listen in on the little crowd. "You're rambling… and you haven't shown me any awesome Justsu yet! Wait" the boy exclaimed "you have studied under that pervert, haven't you?! Your Oiroke no Jutsu must have grown very powerful… but it can never match up to mine!"

Konohamaru's hands flashed into a hand-sign before a puff of sudden smoke rose up around him and obfuscated him. Once it was gone a curvy young woman, naked and long of brown hair and dark eyes, stood preening with a sultry pout, and chaos erupted as mothers shielded their children's eyes, distracted passers-by smacked into walls and lampposts or dropped their jaws to stare, and Sakura began cursing and shouting.

"Perverted brat! Do you know what a silly-" she stopped as she looked to Naruko and saw her pull a slight smile.

"Konohamaru-kun, I don't do that technique anymore" she said gently but firmly as the naked woman poofed out of existence to be replaced by a saddened Konohamaru. "And neither should you". Sakura couldn't help but be amazed at how much Naruko had grown up, how mature she had become, and how pretty she had gotten. "That technique…" And she must have grown really powerful now, and have many other Jutsu at her disposal, and she had probably made a new and even more powerful Jutsu than the Rasengan. "That technique is too weak! Behold – Oiroke no Jutsu 2.0 – Twincesto Powah!"

 _Wait_ , Sakura finally thought, _what_? And in a puff of smoke she saw the new Jutsu.

"Nee-san" Naruko moaned slightly through pursed lips as an identical clone of her suddenly stood behind her, holding her around the waist and busily kissing the base of her neck while her hands groped a chest now clad in a school girl's sailor uniform unbuttoned and half-undone, her tan skin glistening with sweat. "Don't" one Naruko mumbled to the other weakly. "Sisters shouldn't do things like this! It's so wrong-" she gasped when the groping clone distended her tongue and licked her neck, leaving behind a trail of shining saliva, turning her protests into heated whispers. "And yet, so right! Kiss me, nee-"

"Naruko! _Shannaro_!" Sakura roared and struck with all her might, dispelling the transformation and the clone and sending Naruko slamming into a far-off wall, the pinkette's eyebrows twitching as she clenched her fists and looked around. Konohamaru and Udon stared in awe at the spot Naruko once had occupied, and Moegi looked like she didn't know if she adored Naruko or Sakura more, but it was the new arrivals that drew Sakura's attention the most.

"Shikamaru" Temari growled at the man who had been escorting her until they had stopped to watch something… something you would never see on the streets of Sunagakure; that was for certain. "Were you looking at that little slut?"

"What?" the Nara looked to his, nominally, girlfriend, dazed and unsteady on his feet. "What?! No! Never! You're-" he felt something drip down onto the breast of his shirt and he looked down and felt with his fingers to find his profusely bleeding nose betraying him. "Troublesome" he sighed.

"You arse!" Temari roared and chased after him with drawn fan as he tried to escape her rage and abusive nature, running so fast he kicked up a trail of dust into the air that whoozed away behind him.

"Aow" Naruko stood from the wall into which she had been punched, dusting off her coat with a frown. "Whaddya do that for? That was mean-attebayo!"

"You perverted brat!" came the angry exclamation in turn and made Naruko wince. "There I was thinking that you had grown up, and then suddenly you do something like that. Konohamaru corps" she snapped without looking "scram! I need to drag my retarded teammate in front of the Hokage, so piss off!"

"Hyō, Sakura-sama!" Moegi promptly barked and began to drag her quiet teammate and her loud teammate away by the scruffs of their necks while Sakura took a fierce grip on the blonde's arm and began to pull her towards the Hokage spire.

"You've gotten so unwomanly, Sakura" Naruko complained loudly as she was half-dragged along for the distance to the tower next to the Academy.

"Look who's talking" came the swift and lecturing response. "You're the one that uses masculine pronouns and who's rude all the time. Quite unbefitting of a lady, you know! The way you talk… and the way you dress! Would it kill you to wear a dress or a skirt every now and then?"

"Oh, don't be like that" the blonde pouted dourly, a little insulted, as she tore her arm free and began to strut alongside the pinkette with her hands on the back of her head like she usually did, going along freely to the Hokage tower. "There's nothing wrong with my clothes, ya know? Black works on everyone, and orange is the new black-attebayo. And if you don't like the way I talk well… you can bloody well sod off!"

"It's not that much for me" Sakura said as they arrived at the entry to the tower and were let inside without fuss by guards who could recognize the Hokage's apprentice anywhere. "But… wait, you don't have a boyfriend now, have you?"

"W-what's that got to do with anything?" Naruko stammered back while blush crept into her whiskered cheeks.

"Nothing – just curious, that's all" Sakura replied hastily before a thought that made her embarrassed all to hell occurred to her. "Or maybe you got a… girlfriend?"

"No!" Naruko shook her head "I do not have a girlfriend! Uhm, not that there's any problem with… stuff like that… but I haven't had the time for anything else but training for the last… three fucking years" she explained hesitantly as they made their way up the tower. "B-but why do you ask? Kinda weird talking about this-attebayo. Like, first question you ask after I get back after three damn years away".

"But don't you see?" Sakura pressed. "If you keep acting like this then you'll never get a boyfriend… or a girlfriend, for that matter. Start talking properly, put some makeup and a skirt on to show off those legs, and you'll be beating the boys away with a stick!"

"I don't need a guy to be happy, and I don't base my life around whether or not I have a guy" she retorted swiftly, holding back the " _unlike others I could mention_ " that she had been about to spout back. Saying that would just have hurt Sakura and herself.

"I'm not saying you should, Naruko. But three years… don't you get lonely?" And that, _that_ , was the question that hurt the most.

"Nah, that makes me able to focus on training properly" Naruko shrugged with a smirk that looked natural but certainly wasn't. She held back the true answer: _I've always been lonely, so I'm used to it by now_. "And if – _if_ , mind you – I do decide to get a boyfriend, or a partner or whatever, I want someone who likes me for who I am, not who I dress like. I'm not going to make myself look like Ino-chan just because I like a guy-attebayo".

"That's always important; to be able to be yourself around your partner and never pretend anything" Sakura nodded as they ascended the last stairs and came into the main hallway of the top-most floor where the Hokage's office and the rookery were located. "But guys are pretty dumb as a rule, you know? You basically got to beat them over with a sign saying 'Take me!' to get them to know that you're interested in them. Dressing up for a date is the first thing you can do".

"I still don't wanna get tarted up, ya know?" she went as they followed the arching hallway towards a corner, beyond which lay the double doors of the Hokage's office. "Not only do I suck at it, but it's just a waste of time".

"Well, not all of us can get perfect tans without even tanning" Sakura muttered.

"Oh, stove it, Haruno" she replied testily as they went towards that corner. "And you think I have it easy? Because of certain lumps of fat" she gestured sharply at a certain area of her body in indication "my back gets so bloody sore you could chuck a sword through my spine and I wouldn't even notice. And training, and fighting? You know how many sports bras I go through in a year? I'd kill to be small like you-"

And that was all she had time to say before her distracted yammering made her miss the fact that she was walking right into something that was just around that far corner, and she bounced off it, her balance breaking until she fell on her rear end hard and probably bruised her tailbone.

"Naruko! Daishobu?" Sakura looked to her friend first, but her worries and most of her coherent thoughts evaporated as she looked to the thing Naruko had bounced off.

"Owie" the blonde tomboy whined as she rubbed the small of her back. "What was that? Did someone retarded piece of cartilage decide to put a fucking wall hidden by a corner? Shit, that-" she looked up, and the first thing she saw were a pair of feet.

It was a fairly pretty pair of feet – not that she had a thing for feet or anything – big and callused and nails bare and cut short, and the black sandals that he wore – obviously it was a man's feet, judging by the size of them – were reinforced for long treks and studded for better gripping. Those feet were attached to a pair of legs - obviously again, otherwise it would have been a little weird and possibly disgusting – garbed in a pair of black shinobi fatigue slacks where kunai holsters had been tied at both heavily muscled thighs, held up by a simple black belt of cloth, over which a long chain had been circled around a firm but narrow waist.

Above it: a leather jacket, in that strange colour cream white, unzipped and wide open to reveal a fishnet mesh undershirt and a ripped, bulky torso beneath. The arms of that jacket ended an inch from wrists that connected to bare, callused and heavy hands, showed glimpses of shining steel vambraces, glinting fiercely even in the gloom of that hallway.

The shine blinded Naruko, and she gazed further upwards to see the slightly curved hilt of a yanmaodao sword with a tasselled brass pommel in the shape of a roaring lion jutting over a broad shoulder. Whoever he was, he was tall, though he seemed young when she looked to his face, and that sharp chin of his was sort of familiar to her, shaven clean as it was. His indigo-black hair had been cut short and jagged, standing straight on his head in an almost military fashion, and his pale face was the host of a slowly spreading blush as his eyes were squinted shut.

"Well" Naruko said, having no idea of who this man was "let me just say" she took him in again, and all in all he was incredibly suited to her tastes. "Hello sailor!" she drawled in an exaggerated manner, causing both of them to blush deeper. "Aren't cha gonna help a girl up?"

"Sorry" the man stammered helplessly "N" whatever he said seemed stuck in his throat "N" he stopped, took a deep breath to keep himself from hyperventilating, and his eyes flashed open to stare at her. "Naruko-chan" his voice, deep and melodious to her ears, was still tiny somehow, as if he was only whispered. And when she saw his pale lavender eyes, void of pupils and almost completely white, she realised who he was.

" Hinata?" she asked breathlessly. She remembered a pale little boy, shorter than even her, possessed of a determination and strength that was hidden deep down but also a deep social anxiety and a perpetual blush and near-crippling shyness. But now, after all these years, there was only one thing she could say to the way he had changed.

"Hot damn, lad!" she whooped excitedly.

* * *

After all those years spent imagining her, longing for her, seeing her in front of his eyes every time he went to sleep, yearning for the touch of her skin and the warmth of her smile, meeting her like this wasn't how he had imagined it. She wasn't how he had imagined her.

She was even more glorious than his mind had made the grown up version of her look... and he was making an even bigger arse of himself than he had always feared he would when he saw her again.

"Hot damn, lad!" she broke the tense silence with a grin he could only describe as vixen as she looked up on him from down on the floor, her feet to the ground making her legs bent out in front of her and her hands supporting her weight behind her, arching her back and making her… making her breasts-

 _Must not faint, must not faint, must not faint_ , he chanted internally.

"What the bloody hell have they been feeding ya?" she wondered excitedly, her grin outshining even the sun when it came to brilliance. "You're as big as a conservative party prostitution bill at a knocking shop!"

"What are you on about?" Haruno Sakura asked from aside in a sharp whisper, staring at him and his open jacket for some reason, but he had no eyes for her. The amount of fucks he gave for Haruno at that moment could be counted on one hand by making a fist. All he had were eyes for _her_.

"I have no idea" Naruko professed with a further grin, her whiskered cheeks reddened as her mouth slowly morphed into a shy pout. "Are you-" she reached out her hand towards him, but she didn't even have time to finish her request before he pulled her up.

"S-s-sorry, N-Naruko-cha-chan" he managed to fumble out, and mentally the part of his mind that was sound and sane twatted him over the back of the head. But most of his mind didn't care, for he was holding _her_ hand in his… her small, soft, hand with the tan and silky skin made all the more gentler-seeming by the calluses over her knuckles and fingerpads. "Sorry!" he said again and let of her hand before she noticed how much he was sweating. "I didn't mean to trip you, Naruko-chan, I promise!"

"Well, I've already forgiven you, so you can stop apologising" she rubbed the back of her head with her right hand, the one he hadn't gripped in order to pull her up. "I can tell that Sakura-chan's gotten stronger by the sound trashing she gave me earlier" the girl in question protested wordlessly "but I see you've gotten pretty powerful yourself, huh?"

"Th-thank you, N-Naruko-chan" he managed to mumble. "H-how w-was your training? I'm sure you've gotten a lot s-stronger too".

"You still stutter like that, don't ya?" she smiled up at him, noting the considerable difference in height between them. "Despite the whole 'hunky gay pornstar'-thing you got going on?" He blushed even brighter and averted his eyes to stare at the wall to the side, and she couldn't help but release a chuckle. He was just so… cute! "Don't worry, stud-muffin" she reached out and patted his cheek. "I think it's adorable".

What…?

"Are you here to see the old hag too?" she asked him before he had even had time to register her change of topic and her stepping away to stand beside her old friend.

"Y-yes, I'm here to see H-Hokage-sama" he answered, resisting the urge to lick his lips despite them being very, oh so very dry. "A-are you here for your d-d-debriefing and assignment?"

"Yeah, and Sakura-chan wants me to stop teaching 'inappropriate techniques'" she made quotation marks in the air to accompany her mocking tone in speaking those two words "to the kids. She's probably going to ask the old hag to give me a spanking or something".

Spanking… the mental image of Naruko bent over the busty Hokage's lap, bereft of clothes and face twisted into a mask of painfully sharp pleasure as the slug saint used the flat of her hand to punish her by striking her across her perfect posterior, hitting her with loud slaps again and again… it was almost overpowering.

"You alright, Hinata-kun?" He was catapulted back to reality to see Naruko and Sakura look at him oddly while he internally chanted his Karuko motto: _must not faint, must not faint, must not faint_ , et cetera. It was Sakura who had asked him, a blush in her cheeks and her voice low and docile. What was it with girls talking to him like that these days? They had started doing it a little while after he started training with Lee. Had they somehow heard about that time he had almost killed his cousin and couldn't look him in the eye without seeing a monster?

He had to ask Neji about it.

"I-it's fine, Sakura-chan" he replied with a smile at her to show her that he wasn't the brute she no doubt thought he was, but she simply blushed deeper and averted her eyes. He really had to ask Neji about this. "I was s-summoned by Hokage-sama, b-but Jiraiya-sama is al-already inside".

"Tch" Naruko snorted. "Have you lot been sucking up to the old hag while I was away? She'll just get a big head from that, ya know. She's just keeping the seat warm for me-attebayo. Iku ze" she said and stepped past Hinata towards the closed doors into the Hokage's office "Sakura-chan, Stud-muffin-kun. I'll show you how to deal with obaachans!"

And she took a stance, drew back her leg and kicked the double doors opened with a boom. Sakura made a startled sound and Hinata couldn't keep a fearful squek from escaping his lips before mentally slapping himself for appearing weak before Naruko-chan. But their terror only grew when the blonde young kunoichi stormed inside and took an almost theatrical stance.

"What's up, motherfuckers?!" she cried with a victorious grin. "Rukodaime Hokage in da house-attebayo!" And she promptly made the peace-sign with a wink, keeping the charging ANBU from attacking her as they flashed exasperated looks to their leader.

"What the hell, gaki?!" Senju Tsunade, leader of Konoha and fifth Hokage by the grace of the Spirits of Fire, jumped out of her seat staring daggers at the girl. "I just had those doors put in! Red oak from Do no Kuni! This is coming out of your salary, you mark my words young lady!"

"What cha' talking about, Tsunade-obaachan?!" Naruko cried back, outraged at the very notion of someone taking away her ramen funds. "It's my damn office, so I can do what the hell I like with it! And as soon as you get your decrepit old arse off my chair I'll install some revolving doors!"

"Not in my lifetime you will!" they argued as Hinata and Sakura nervously edged into the office, avoiding the rage of their mistress and commander to stand beside the wide-eyed Shizune and the exasperated Jiraiya.

"Haruno, Hyūga!" Jiraiya ignored the verbally sparring women, each currently in the process of telling the other that their clothes befitted only slatterns and women of the even kind. "How's digs?"

"Alright, I guess" Sakura managed to tell him.

"Quite fine, thank you, Jiraiya-sama" Hinata bowed.

"Bah!" Jiraiya flashed the young man a grin and put a hand upon his shoulder. "Stop with that 'sama' nonsense! Think of me like an uncle" he gracefully moved his head out of the way to dodge a thrown sake cup that smashed out the window behind him and hit a stray dove. "Like a drunken old uncle that comes into town every odd year, eating all your pies and shagging all your birds".

"Jiraiya-sama" Sakura asked him, acting now oblivious to the crashing behind her as Tsunade put the blonde girl in a head lock and was busy pummelling the top of her head. "Are you alright? You show signs of fatigue, premature aging and lack of judgement-"

"What do you mean 'lack of judgement'?" he protested.

"You referred to women as 'birds' while being in the same room as Tsunade-sama" Shizune pointed out from aside.

"Indeed" Sakura went on as if she hadn't been interrupted in the first place while Tsunade threatened to banish the owners of Ichiraku Ramen from Konoha while Naruko begged her not to with horrified tears streaming down her cheeks. "All signs of chakra exhaustion. You should go to the hospital, get yourself checked up".

"Aye, whatever you say, mini-Tsunade" the perverted sage grinned at her and looked over to the two bickering women, Naruko crying "You're crushing me!" as Tsunade squeezed the girl into her ample bosoms in the midst of a bear-hug.

"You've been keeping up with the energiser vixen for three years, Jiraiya-sama" Sakura lectured at him. "No one alive can do that and not suffer adverse effects. You should get yourself checked out as soon as we're done-"

"What do you mean my apartment got re-appropriated?!" they suddenly looked up to see Naruko in a genuine rage.

"That's what happens when you forget to pay the rent for three years, gaki" Tsunade took her seat behind her desk again.

"Couldn't you stall the tick man or something?" Naruko whined. "That was _my_ flat, ya know? I've lived there since I was five years old!"

"You don't pay your rent or make any arrangements to that effect and you suffer the consequences" the Hokage spoke firmly, an authoritive air creeping into her voice. She had become a great leader, Jiraiya noted as he looked to her with a warmth in his heart. It was like her grandfather's mantle had fallen over her seeped into her, for she spoke like she had been born onto that role.

"But- but- but where am I going to stay?" Naruko pleaded for an answer, and Tsuande's face adopted an expression of compassionate understanding. "I don't have enough money for a hotel, and I won't stay with ero-sennin-"

"You can stay with me at the mannor, baby girl" Tsunade said to the almost crying blonde, who perked up at the news but suddenly frowned.

"But… you're going to cramp my style, obaachan" she complained, and the Hokage's eyebrows began to twitch dangerously.

"If you don't want to stay on the damn streets you'd best take a better tone with me, gaki!"

"Okay, okay… jeez" Naruko rolled her eyes at her "kaasan".

"Kaa… san?" Tsunade wondered, stunned, in awe at the sudden change in the form of address the girl used. "Why…?"

"If I'm going to stay with you it's better that I think of you as my mother than my granny, right?" the perky young kunoichi said as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and to anyone but Jiraiya's practiced eyes Tsunade simply smiled slightly and scoffed as if amused. He, on the other hand, could tell that inwardly she melted. "Otherwise it'd be a little weird, ya know?"

"Good" the buxom old woman who looked much young than she actually was nodded as if satisfied. "Most of your possessions are at a storage facility right now. Shizune will see to it that they are moved over to… your new home, heh, after this meeting. But first" her smile faded as she gestured all of the people in attendance, excluding her ANBU bodyguards, to stand before her desk. "Business. How have your training gone, Naruko? Have you gotten stronger?"

The girl smiled confidently. "Yeah, I have. You can bet your hat on it-attebayo".

"Good. But your new skills will need to be evaluated so that we know where we have the best use for them" she went on, as severe as ever before she looked to Hinata. "Hyūga-san…"

"Osu, Hokage-sama!" he bowed curtly in reply, apt like a good little soldier.

"I need your team for a special matter… which I will discuss with you after I've dealt with Naruko and Sakura, ne?" he nodded again, and she dismissed him with a wave.

"Nice to see you again, Hinata-kun!" she waved him off cheerily, grinning at his back as he left the room, and at the door he gave her a shy blush and the slightest of smiles before he closed the doors from the outside. "Okay, spill!" she turned to Sakura. "When the hell did he grow those abs?"

"Huh?" came the oh so articulate question.

"Seriously, did you not see that washboard thing he got going on?" Naruto questioned incredulously, thinking back on the sigh of his mesh-clad torso beneath his unzipped leather jacket. "I mean, there was, like, more than six of them, at least-attebayo. Maybe eight… or ten. And those pecks…" her words faded away into a dreamy haze until Tsunade clapped her hands once to summon her attention.

"Oi! I know you got the attention span of a mayfly, but allow me to interrupt your fantasizing about hunky boys-"

"Shotacon!" Naruko accused with a gasp. "He's like a tenth of your age!"

"You little-" she forced herself to be still and ignore Jiraiya's snicker until she could take him out the back and disembowel him out of sight from prying eyes. "As I was about to say, before you so rudely interrupted me, I will need you to be evaluated to determine your current strengths. Both of you two will" she slid her gaze over to Sakura, who nodded and smirked in eager obedience. "And I have just the person in mind to test your skills".

* * *

Hinata sat outside the battered doors to the Hokage's office at a respectable distance as not to overhear anything said therein. The Hokage's private matters were her private matters, after all, and her concerns could often deal with things no one but her were supposed to know about. As he sat, he thought about his nature, and about who he was.

Hyūga Hinata was a pervert.

Not everyone knew that, of course. It was a secret he had guarded closely ever since he had been seven years old and first seen her, and most people thought simply that he was head over heels in love with her when they saw him blush and stammer every time he saw her. But that was only part of the truth.

He loved her, aye so it was. The mere mention of her name, that blessed name seemingly inscribed onto the inside of his heart by the fates themselves in the hour of his birth, brought a crimson blush to his cheeks, and if he stood in her presence he couldn't help but to be intoxicated by her. Her name was the most frequent word in his diary, often ringed in by little hearts and flowers, and he saw her face before his eyes every time he lay down onto his bed and drifted off to sleep.

Yes: he loved Uzumaki Naruko. It was an obsessive, all-consuming love, and it had defined his entire character for the longest time. He had observed her from afar, admired her brash and unrelenting nature and worshiped her great combat prowess in silence. They had both been children then, and as he was merely twelve years old his affection had been fairly chaste and subdued.

But then she had gone away, and though it felt like there was a hole in his life with her missing from it he had tried to move on. He had gone on three dates – three, no less! – all at the behest of his older cousin Neji who was insistent on it. He kept saying that the heir to the Hyūga clan had an obligation to produce further members to it and secure the clan's future, and that monogamy was simply not a word that should be in Hinata's vocabulary. Even his father had encouraged it. After all, his father had several children with many mistresses within the clan beyond his two legitimate children with Hinata's mother, and his mother never seemed to mind. It was a part of the Hyūga lifestyle, and it was best that he got used to it.

One of these girls was Ten-Ten, a teammate of his cousin who had said that Hinata was "cute". Another had been a girl from the clan called Narimi, who took great pride in her Hyūga appearance of long hair and pale, almost completely white, eyes, and the last had been some pale-haired girl from the civilian portion of the village called Miina. She was the one he had thought the most attractive, but even as they spoke over their food at a yakiniku restaurant he had felt uneasy and despicable. In the end he had thanked all the girls curtly and gone home without so much as giving them a dirty look or a peck on the cheek, that one girl still blazing like a fire in his mind.

It was after one of these occurrences that he discovered that he was a pervert. He had been lying in his bed, thinking about her, her smile and her long blonde hair and the lustre of her whiskered cheeks and the sway of her hips as she walked, and suddenly, at the thought of her rear, his manhood had grown to erection, throbbing painfully. So he had pleasured himself to the memory of her, and imagined her doing all manner of perverted things with him – kissing him, holding him, forcing her tongue down her throat as she stroked his length, pressing her breasts up against him while she guided his thickness inside of-

And so he had ejaculated, and afterwards as he cleaned himself with a paper tissue he had felt sick. He was thirteen then, and she had to be… fourteen, and he had not seen her for almost a year. To imaging doing such wanton things with the love of his life… he felt sick as he thought back on the images he had made in his mind even as his manhood stirred again.

For months it went on like that – dates he didn't much want to go to in the evenings after training in the days, and then he would pleasure himself in the comfort of his own room and hate himself for it. The more he did it the more wanton his imaginings became, and the sicker he felt afterwards, and the disgust he felt for himself began to seep into his conscience even during the days and his training hours and in the missions he did with the rest of his team. It distracted him, and his performance seemed to falter to the disgust of his father and his cousin and the worry of his teacher, Kurenai-sensei. She almost decided against sending him to the Sunagakure chunin exams along with the rest of his team.

Almost.

In the end he passed the exams, but only just, only by the grace of his teammates who had kept him safe in a sandstorm and rescued him using the Inuzuka sense of smell and the bugs of the Aburame to move them outside of the range of an enemy's attack. Hinata… had managed to do nothing but reflect his opponent's attacks. In the end they had to be rescued – rescued! – by the proctors of the village they sought to impress. After the exams, on the way back to Konoha, no one said anything about his weakness and his poor showing, involved as they were in their own thoughts and discussions, too busy to pay any heed to the lone lad that trailed after in the rear of the procession. But as he walked with his pale eyes fixed on the ground he could feel their scorn. He could feel their disgust.

He was weak. Always he had been weak, and he had kept the seat as heir to the clan simply by the virtue of being the only son of the current clan head. He had not even been able to best his cousin. Granted, Neji was the famed head of the Hyūga branch family, an acknowledged and renowned genius, but he was of the branch family still. He was a servant and a guard meant to protect the heirs to the clan, and Hinata was a poor heir that couldn't even defend himself. Even his little sister could beat him in practice if she tried hard enough. He was weak… and he would always be weak.

Once they got home to Konoha and got notice of their promotion his family wanted to celebrate his promotion, and he had joined in the festivities in a token manner, his focus turned inwards as he was steeped in his own thoughts. He had excused himself early and gone back to his room, his footsteps echoing in the halls of the main house now empty of everyone but him. He was alone. Always alone, and weak.

When he had stripped himself of clothing and laid down onto his bed to rest his thoughts had gone out to that girl, that blonde girl whom he loved and lusted for with all his being, the one he had not seen for a long time. As always when he thought of her and her perfect lips and bright blue eyes he got harder than rock, and so he began to relieve himself in the way teenage boys do.

But it was different in his mind this time. Instead of preening and smiling and embracing him her face, so beautiful, so fair, twisted into a sneer. "You think you are worthy of me?" his dream version of her asked and spat at him. "You'll never be! You're weak! Weak! Pathetic!"

And instead of going on masturbating the young man broke down in tears and cried himself to sleep. In his dreams he chased after her, always at her back, running towards a girl he would never catch up to and who would never love him back.

The next day he wandered aimlessly through the halls of the Hyūga compound, ghosting through life like a phantom. It went on for days, his empty stare burning holes in the hearts of those who cared for him, but when they went to try and bring him out of his depression he saw only his own self-loathing reflected back at him in their worry. He declined all offers Shino and Kiba made of going out or going on missions, he refused his younger sister's insistences of playing or going into town, he ignored his father's pondering queries as to his health and wellbeing.

In the end it was Neji who brought him back to the land of the living.

One morning Hinata was busy brooding when the divider into his chambers slid open so hard that it banged into the far wall, and he looked up to see his cousin standing there, clothed for missions, teeth bare in a snarl as his chest heaven in uncharacteristic fury. "The dojo!" he snapped, Byakugan eyes activated. "Now!"

It wasn't a request, but an order. And Hinata was almost dragged into the dojo to a sparring match between him and the genius, most of the clan and his teammates and sensei sitting as spectators. "Neji-kun, stop it" he said weakly and the young genius took a stance opposite to him on the mat of the dojo. His mother was even there, along with two of his father's mistresses. "I don't feel like-"

"I couldn't give two shits what you feel just now, cousin" Neji practically growled. "This is about the clan. This is about our legacy. Now we will spar" Neji raised his hands into his signature guard "whether you want to or not!"

"Neji, just shut up-" Hinata began, but his cousin was already charging at him, eyes activated, chakra blazing around him. It was all he could to dodge and move out of the range of the Hyūga prodigy's divination. "Stop it!" he cried, but Neji pursued, leaping after him with palm outstretched, aiming for his shoulder. Hinata knew that strike. If he got hit the blow would fall upon his key bone and snap his shoulder in half, potentially crippling him. He had to get away…

Or he had to fight back.

So he blocked and returned the favour at his cousin, forcing his weakened body into fighting after days of not having eaten correctly. In his emancipated state Neji deflected his counter easily. "Is this your best?" he barked and lashed out again and again, faster and faster, forcing Hinata on the extreme defensive. "Is this all you've got?!"

"Neji-kun, stop it!" he pleaded through a voice now quivering with lack of strength and a throat run ragged with heavy breaths, but the genius of the Hyūga was merciless. He struck thrice more, and now once of his blows slipped through Hinata's guard to land upon his lower thigh, sending a lance of pain through his leg before it was numbed of all sensation. "Agh!"

"As I thought" Neji stood tall while Hinata fell to the floor, clutching his leg. "You haven't changed a bit since our last fight during the first chunin exams. You're still as useless in a fight".

"Stop it, Neji-kun" he cried and tried to stand, but a blow onto his back made agony spear through his body and sent him back onto his knees.

"Crying like a little girl" Neji growled "weeping like a frightened civilian. To think that you would be the future of this clan?" he chuckled cruelly as the clan looked on in silence. "You're pathetic!"

"Shut up!" Hinata clenched his eyes shut as his cousin unknowingly echoed the words of the Naruko he so often saw in his dreams. "Just stop it!"

"Weak" Neji snorted finally, and the word seemed to vibrate throughout Hinata's entire being. Weak. Was that all he was? Weak. Unworthy of her, unworthy of the clan. Weak.

But unlike before the word didn't fill him with apathy and shame.

Neji watched with hidden satisfaction as Hinata's pale eyes flashed open with all the power of their bloodline blazing in them, anger burning in his gut. Hiashi had given him the mission to awaken his cousin from his torpor, and he had thought it best to do so forcefully after all gentle methods had failed. His mission seemed to have succeeded as Hinata stood slowly, limping slightly and favouring his injured leg.

"You want to fight back, finally?" Neji wondered, but he barely had time to finish his goading before Hinata changed forever and struck like thunder, the rage and self-loathing finally breaking down the dam that was his restraint. And within him the beast started to roar.

Hinata roared wordlessly and charged, striking the unawares caught genius in the stomach with the same blow Neji had once used on him, sending a shower of blood exploding from the older boy's lips. The clan gasped collectively, Hizumi, Hinata's mother, clasping her hands in front of her mouth in sudden terror.

" Hinata! Cease!" Hiashi ordered, but the heir to the clan was deaf to his father's pleas. Now the situation seemed reversed, as it was Neji who was struggling to remain standing and Hinata who was striking truly and cruelly. A blow to the genius's arm broke it with a sickening snap like the sound of a rotten twig breaking. Another to his leg, half blocked, weakened his further until he fell onto his back, and Hinata launched himself atop his cousin, snarling like a beast, driven beyond words and reason as he struck Neji over the face again and again with closed fists blazing with chakra. In the end he had to be pulled off with great force, and the clan beheld the state of their champion in abject terror.

"Take him to the hospital!" Hiashi snapped at two branch family members. "If the Hokage doesn't treat his injuries soon he'll die!" He turned then onto his only son and oldest child where he was restrained by the iron grips of three guards. "What is the meaning of this? Explain yourself!"

"I'm not weak" Hinata panted, long repressed emotion burning in his eyes. "I won't be weak anymore! I'm going to make myself worthy!"

"No one worthy of being clan leader beats their family within an inch of his life!" Hiashi retorted, and Hinata seemed to snap out of his rage to stare with wide eyes at the large pool of blood that had been smeared over the mats in the middle of the dojo. Neji had been taken away, and only a few clan members remained in the chamber, among them his weeping mother and a pale Hanabi, staring with terrified eyes at her brother. "Such savagery! Barbarism, that's what it is!"

"He had it coming" Hinata said firmly as he tore himself loose from the grips of the guards and stomped of, heading out of the compound, going anywhere and nowhere.

In the end he headed towards a training ground that had a decent sized forest and proceeded to take his frustration and pent up rage on the trees until most of them had been reduced to kindling and his palms and knuckles were cracked and bleeding. Panting he collapsed then, falling to the ground as tears began to roll down his cheeks, and he stared at his fingers in disgust. Had he meant it? Had he meant to harm Neji to such an extent? Had he meant to almost kill him?

So he went to Konoha Hospital and inquired as to the condition of his cousin, and once he found out that Neji was wide awake and not in any serious condition, and so he snuck into his cousin's room under the cover of darkness to sit by his side when he woke.

"I'm so sorry, Neji-niisan" Hinata had said as he sat in a chair by the sick bed and stared at all the bandages that covered the older boy. "I don't know what came over me".

"It's quite alright, Hinata-sama" Neji smiled weakly and took his hand. "I goaded you to try and bring you out of your depression… I must admit it worked a little too well".

"Heh" Hinata said in what was half a chuckle, half a sob.

"Why are you sad, Hinata-sama?" Neji wondered softly, frowning despite the bandages that were tied around his head and the medicine that kept him happy and awake to avoid sleeping due to his multiple concussions. "You've been growing distant over the last year. Is something the matter?"

"I-" he shook his head hard at himself. "It's nothing".

"There is something. Ever since the chunin exam… and before even that, you've been sad almost all the time, almost never smiling" Neji went on sombrely. "Tell me" he urged when the younger boy stayed silent and tight-lipped. "You can tell me everything, Hinata-sama".

"Do you" Hinata began and licked his lips "do you remember Uzumaki Naruko-chan?" he asked, and Neji gave him an incredulous look.

"Remember the only person who has ever beaten me until today?" Neji arched an eyebrow, his tone as serious as always. "Of course I do, Hinata-sama. What about her?"

"I" Hinata found himself stammering as he only did in the company of his one true love, his tongue feeling three times bigger than it actually was. "I – I th-think I'm in l-l-love with her!" he finally blurted out, and Neji's look in return was flat.

"No shit" he spoke just as flatly. "Have you been promoted to commander of the obvious squad? Should I start calling you Obvious-taicho?"

"You knew?" Hinata asked, wide of eye and a blush burning in his cheeks.

"Everyone knows except for Naruko-san" Neji said simply. "That girl is thicker than sake paste sometimes. And I can't for the life of me understand what you see in her. But" Neji added in a slow acknowledgement "the heart wants what it wants. Why has your love for her made you sad?"

"Because I'm not worthy of her" Hinata whispered, the words pouring from his lips as the dam holding his emotions back had been broken. "I'm weak, like you said. And she's so strong. She even beat you without having to surprise you or resort to dirty tricks. She's beautiful, you know? And I'm just a plain guy that doesn't have half of her skill or talent or ability. I will never be worthy of her".

"Bollocks" Neji stated firmly in hard reply. "She's the one that won't be worthy of you. You're strong, Hinata" he pressed his cousin's hand "and you're the kindest and gentlest person in this village. And believe when I say that your potential with the Jūken and the Byakugan is the greatest I have ever seen. Even greater than mine" he said, and that utterance made Hinata look up to his cousin's eyes in stunned amazement. "All you need to catch up to her and prove yourself worthy is the will to do it".

"But I don't-" he grew sombre, but Neji wasn't done.

"Discipline and strength of will and character: these things can be learnt. One you have that the rest will follow" Neji was confident in that, and Hinata's mind swam at the thought.

"But if I haven't gotten any stronger yet, doing the things I've always done, how do I grow stronger?" he asked.

"Only you know the answer to that. If one road to enlightenment is closed to you, know that there are many others that are open". Neji smiled weakly again, tending to his cousin's tender feelings. "Try a new method, a new path to walk, or a new teacher. You're my little brother, Hinata, and I know that with enough hard work you can do anything. 'I'll never give up-'"

"'And never go back on my word. Such is my Shinobi vow!'" they echoed the words spoken by Naruko so long ago now, and Hinata found his tears drying and a smile returning to his face in the first time in forever. "You really think I can become strong?"

"I know that you can grow strong enough to surpass us all, Hinata-kun" Neji replied.

And in the days to come he was determined to prove his cousin right. Neji would take a couple of months so any work he could do to improve his Jūken techniques would have to wait until the genius was better once more. Until then he would have to practice other things… but what?

He thought of what Naruko would find impressive, his adoration for her still one of his determining character traits, and decided against Genjutsu, and she would no doubt find a specialisation in such a discipline to be foppish and weak. And Hinata lacked aptitude for more advanced Ninjutsu, as he had a fairly limited chakra reservoir compared to many others in his age group and had to train it up first before he settled on studying the sorcerous shinobi art. As such there were only a few options left to him, and Fuinjutsu didn't sound very appealing to him. That left him only Taijutsu and other options for close quarters combat.

And he just so happened to know whom was the foremost expert on hand-to-hand fighting in all of Konoha.

"Yosh!" Lee decreed, jumping up on the table in the dining hall of the Hyūga family, startling several servants and clan members and scarring away the pigeons nesting on the roof tiles far above them. "It shall be my honour to teach you everything I know, Hinata-san! The fire of youth shall spread to engulf all the world!"

"I just want to know if you have any exercises for strength-" Hinata began to protest with a tired look, but flinched and jumped away as reached down and pulled something out of his leg warmers. He saw them then, the weights that Lee always wore, and then the idea dawned on him. "Weights?"

"Wear them whenever you exercise and your youthful fire shall blaze grand under the weights and transform your simple carbon muscles into diamond!" he decreed in a manner most operatic. "And I shall teach you the basics of the Gōken style to grind and polish that diamond into a brilliant shine!"

"Sure" Hinata smiled at the young man who was clearly insane and took the weights from him, groaning in surprise as his arms slammed into the floor under their mass. "Isn't this a little much, Lee-san?" he suggested in a strangled tone.

"Nonsense! The greatest adversity leads to the greatest of triumphs! The greatest of villains demands the greatest of heroes!" he lectured firmly and jumped off the table, pulling the legs of Hinata's trousers up to fasten the weights around his ankles. "I shall bring you others soon, for your arms and legs both, but for now we shall go to your dojo, and I shall teach you the Gōken way!"

Hinata was already beginning to regret that particular undertaking. He especially began to regret it when Lee took him out on a hike in the mountains… walking only on the palms of his hands.

And he knew then for a fact that both Lee and his sensai Gai were insane. But after three months of the gruelling training he didn't doubt that it had results, and when he and Neji spared once his cousin had recuperated their fight ended in a draw, as Neji's technique was matched to Hinata's new strength, speed and versatility. Neji then decided it was time for them to advance the Jūken arts into territories yet unseen, and so they studied and sparred for many long hours every evening Hinata didn't have any missions. In the mornings Neji had other matters to attend to, often with his team or as Taijutsu instructor at the Academy, and so Hinata turned to another discipline she had neglected for too long.

"I don't know" Sharingan Kakashi, the foremost expert on ninjutsu in Konoha after the passing of Sarutobi Hiruzen, muttered in a manner most bored while he scratched his head. "You already have the Byakugan, don't cha? Why would you need Ninjutsu too?"

"If I cannot touch my opponent, I need a way to fight them anyway" Hinata said firmly and bowed low. "Please teach me, Hatake-sensei!"

"But the more advanced techniques of the Jūken are capable of ranged attacks" he protested, but as he saw the determination in the look Hinata gave him he surrendered. "Alright, I can coach you in basic Ninjutsu theory and practice. If nothing else it might give you some diversified skills. What is your nature release affinity?"

"Katon – fire" Hinata stated simply, and bushy brows furrowed over a single eye.

"Sure… Katon. I thought it would be something rare in this country, what with the Hyūga blood and all. Maybe Suiton – yeah, you seem like a Suiton guy to me – or Fuuton maybe. But almost every Shinobi in this nation has the fire release affinity".

"Are you going to teach me or are you going to complain, Kakashi-sensei?" Hinata wondered.

"You haven't been talking to Sakura or Naruko lately, have you?" he grumbled in response and stood up, pocketing his eroge book and dusting off his slacks. "I usually do both, ya know".

He had thought that the copy-shinobi's training regimen couldn't possibly be worse than Lee's, but it actually was, if only for the fact that Kakashi had a much different attitude to teaching than the one Gai had instilled in his disciple. Kakashi had a relaxed attitude to life and teaching and preferred to shout instructions and encouragement from the side-lines while Hinata worked his ass off in the exercises. Kakashi also said he had a prototype regimen in mind for someone else, whom he did not say, that involved Hinata summoning as many shadow clones as he could in order to speed up his learning process by absorbing the knowledge clones gained when he dispelled them… or somesuch. He wasn't focused on that as much as he was determined to learn all the secret arts that he had ignored before.

And Kakashi watched, outwardly impassive, as the boy pushed himself harder than he had seen anyone ever push themselves before. Naruko could have matched him, perhaps, or Sasuke, but Hinata lacked the massive chakra reservoirs of those two and the natural aptitude the both of them possessed for Ninjutsu. He was proud of the boy's efforts… until the time the lad almost killed himself.

Hinata barely remembered it happening. One minute he had been standing with his hands pressed to a tree stump, focusing on making it catch fire and be reduced to embers with nothing but his chakra and nature manipulation, and then suddenly his head had exploded, or at least felt like it had, and he awoke in a hospital chamber days later, an iv attached to his arm and a silent Neji sitting worried beside him. Chakra exhaustion, they said – and if he kept at it like that then he would essentially poison his blood with irradiation and be find himself in a state of eventual living death and chakra coil degeneration. He was under orders to rest and recuperate, to regain his strength for a few months before he went back to training.

Naturally he was on his feet after two weeks and tried to continue only to pass out from exhaustion after five minutes, after which his father took him aside and strictly forbade him to ever practice anything but Jūken techniques ever again. "You are a Hyūga, my son. You need nothing but your hands and your eyes".

Yes, he was a Hyūga. As he sat meditating in his room in the compound that night, the room that had become his prison in so many ways, he looked inwards and asked: why? Why was he a Hyūga? Wherefore was he Hyūga? He knew that if he kept training as he did the chances of him running himself into the ground was insanely high, and the clan techniques were safer, more suited to his own chakra and constitution.

But if he didn't push himself as hard as Naruko, how could he ever be worthy of her?

Why would she ever look at him if he was anything less than equal to her?

She was protecting everyone, even when they scorned and ignored her and spat curses at her back, and she was putting herself in so much danger in doing so. So maybe it was that she needed – someone to look after her, to take care of her, be there for her.

And how could he do that if he was weaker than her?

The path to the power he craved was fraught with danger, but he could not walk it as Hyūga Hinata. Like the Yondaime, whom he had been named for, he could only stand his strongest if he walked that path without family and worldly distractions. And so he made the decision.

He opened his eyes from his meditative state and stood, his hands in fists at his hips and his pale eyes set in determination. If he did this, there would be no going back. He would do like that traitor, Sasuke, though his treachery would be less. He wouldn't leave his village. Only his family.

And so he gathered his things and all the funds he had saved up over the years and threw them into a bag, shedding his white and lavender hooded jacket and leaving it behind before he threw a black jacket over his shoulders and looked at himself in his full body mirror. His appearance was Hyūga no longer in body, for the training he had kept under Lee had made him bulky and strong where many of the clan were lithe and willowy, and his clothes no longer bore the clan colours, but his hair, his face, his eyes were all Hyūga.

His thoughts went to one of the jounin sensei he knew that had made the same choice that he did now, and his lips bent into a slight smile. And with a kunai in one hand he grasped the long dark indigo hair that fell halfway down his back and sheared it off, leaving only jagged spikes of black upon his head standing straight up in a style reminiscent of Sarutobi Asuma's. With the hair gone his face seemed leaner, sharper, and hungrier.

And only the Hyūga eyes remained of his bloodline heritage.

That night he left the clan compound behind him with the intent to never return.

Of course, he went back there often. His father didn't disown him or revoke his Hyūga status or force him to join the branch family. He could still play with his little sister, who was quickly growing up, and talk with all his relatives and ask his father for advice and spar with his cousin, and if his teammates came around for missions or what-not he could easily indulge them under the name Hyūga Hinata. As far as the world was concerned he was the same lad as always – simply living elsewhere but the compound in which he had grown up. He got a small studio apartment in the centre of Konoha and resolved to live on his own.

If he wanted to be worthy of his beloved he had to know a little of what she had gone through.

The first few weeks, months, living on his own were hard, harder than he had ever thought possible. Without the sounds of the house and his family and clan moving around him, greeting and helping him with the task of the day-to-day he felt blind and lost all alone in the woods with no way home. Cooking for himself, washing for himself, taking care of his own expenses and living on his own will and actions alone was a heavy thing, but as the months wore on it became strangely empowering. He lived on his own, and he didn't need them to keep him upright. He could stand on his own now.

He was weak no longer.

He celebrated his fifteenth birthday in that apartment, surrounded by friends and immediate family. Ten-Ten got slightly inappropriate and tried to mack on him, saying something about her adoring him and always thinking he was cute and that she loved him, but he pushed her away firmly but kindly. There was but one for him, and he longed for the sight of that blonde angel. No one else would simply do anymore. The others seemed to understand, and got him the things he would have wanted for birthday presents: Kiba got him a white leather jacket very similar to his own, and Shikamaru and Asuma gave him a curved sword of a heavy foreign design unlike the Katanas of the Shinobi nations, a chakra blade that suited the Jūken fighting style he had created. Sakura and the others got him tools, kunai, clothes, medicines and provisions for future missions, and lastly, from his father, he got a single long length of chain with a weight attached to each end.

"Let these links be as your determination" his father had spoken with pride in his eyes. "Unbreakable. And promise me that you will never give up".

"I'll never give up, father" Hinata had spoken fiercely in response. "I'll never go back on my word! Such is my Shinobi way!"

 _Naruko, watch me! I've grown strong for you!_

He was pulled back to reality by a cry from inside the Hokage's office, the voice of the Senju princess herself shrill and harsh. "Whaddya mean 'Kekkei Genkai'?!"

"I'll show you!" came Naruko's eager shout back, and even without his Byakugan eyes active Hinata could tell that some tremendous power was gathering. "Bakuton" she roared "Shakkahō!"

And then the world exploded.

* * *

Chaptawa… endo!

 **A/N:** You know, I think my intention in writing this was seeing how, if Naruto and Hinata's genders were swapped and switched around, their conditions would change giving social standards, gender-roles and other such stuff. This is my take on it, which is probably poor, but whatever, right?

And I added the part about Naruko flirting with Hinata so that he wouldn't come across as a complete fucking stalker, alright? And in regards to Hinata's backstory, I was thinking: what would I do if I had Hinata's life? What would Hinata, if she was a boy, urged to be strong as boys are even more so than women, do if pushed too far? Learn an important lesson and work even harder, it turns out. Huh. How about that?

Anyway, that's the chapter there. Read and Review, and DFTBA!

 **EDITNOTE:** Changed the name from Hinato to Hinata, the latter being unisex which no one had elected to tell me before I posted this thing. Well, the more you know, right?


	2. Explosion! Ineffectual Love!

**A/N:** Due to popular demand I've decided to continue with this little experiment, though it's taking a little longer for me to write than either _Naruto: the White Fox Chronicles_ and _Naruto: Konoha, Crushed_ (Another little thing I'm working on). I'm not convinced there's enough meat on the proverbial bones of this concept to retain a longer story… but we'll see.

Anyway, here's the next chapter. The theme song for the last chapter was AC/DC's _Back in Black_. For this chapter the theme is Within Temptation's _Sinéad_. And without further ado –

Begin!

* * *

Chapter Two: Explosion! Ineffectual Love! Hinata's Secret!

* * *

"So" came the question posed by one blonde to another as they rose from the rubble that had once been the top floor of the Hokage's office, Tsunade staring daggers at her adoptive daughter. "Kekkei Genkai, huh?"

"Yepp" she grinned a little sheepishly in response as she too stood, brushing dust off her clothes and noticing, to her great frustration that she had a large piece of debris caught in her hair. "It's not really under control yet, per see, but it's getting there-attebayo!"

"I really, really hope so" Tsunade grumbled as she waved to clear the air in front of her face, the dust settling from coursing through the air and rendering Shizune and Sakura in long fits of ragged coughing. The entire far wall of the office had been obliterated, large chunks of dry wall laying everywhere, a thin layer of settling grey dust covering everything. "Oh, Scunthorpe" she cursed as she looked to the smashed hallway. "Hinata's under there!"

"Did Naruko murder Hunky-kun?" Sakura wondered with a dazed expression as she stood with Shizune's help, Kakashi-sensei picking himself off the floor while Jiraiya stood lazily leaning against the side of the Hokage's desk, shaking his head as if he had been expecting all of this.

"Oh, I'm going to have one hell of a stimulating fucking conversation with Hiashi-temae about this" Tsunade grumbled as she stomped over to the piles of debris as ANBU seemed to flash into existence from left and right, rushing to attend their mistress in this hours of supposed need. Anyone near the blast had caught but a glimpse of a bright crimson light before an entire wall, and most of the top-floor of the Hokage tower, seemed to be blasted out of existence. Luckily for everyone, the only one who got hurt was Hinata.

"Is he alright?" Naruko wondered as Tsunade pulled the prone form of the Hyūga former heir from our of the dusty wreckage and slung him over her shoulder like a bag of spuds, promptly marching over to her desk and thumping him down on it with little ceremony. "He's not d-?"

"Of course he's not dead" Tsunade rolled her eyes at Naruko and bent over the black-haired soldier along with Shizune and an interested Jiraiya. "See?" she indicated his eye, unresponsive but sliding shut of its own accord, as she lifted his eyelid with her thumb. "He's fine other than a concussion. Sakura gets worse beatings than this when she tumbles down the stairs".

"Only when you push me, shishou" Sakura muttered.

"What was that?" the Hokage wondered at her, and the girl squeaked and fell silent, indicating that her lips were zipped shut and locked thus with a gesture. "I thought so. Looks like someone gets to clean out the faecal matter lab tonight".

"I can't say I remember this one from the last batch" Jiraiya scratched his chin as he looked over the muscled but unconscious form of Hinata-kun, his sword lost somewhere in the explosion. "I mean, he stands out, yeah? Looks a bit like a Sarutobi, when you think of it".

"He's Hyūga through and through" Tsunade pointed out in a lower tone as Sakura and Naruko also gathered around the desk. "Though of a kind you rarely see these days. Oh" she acted as if she had just noticed the two score guards that had rushed to her side "you lot are here. Well, there's no danger or anything so… shoo. Scat! Go do whatever it is you lot do when you're not fussing over me like you're trying to be my mother".

"Hokage-sama" they saluted sombrely and winked out of existence, going back to standing guard, sharpening their knives, intimidating passers-by who flocked at the base of the Hokage tower to see what all the fuss was about, and in one person's case, went back to the balcony where she had been sitting to resume playing Fruit Ninja on her phone.

"He's sort of handsome, isn't he?" Jiraiya's hands went to a pouch at his hip, reaching for pen and notebook to model a new protagonist for his next big hit. He would call it 'Icha Icha Ichizoku' – brilliant! – and the story would star a young man called… Shishi! Shishi and his adventures throughout the land along with his scrappy sidekick Saboten, the flirty maid, and his perverted talking dog, Naru-chan. Fantastic! This thing would sell like buckets of water at an arson appreciation convention!

"I don't get it" Tsunade noted while Shizune, Sakura and even Naruko sighed in agreement with the sage, which he didn't notice as he was busy drawing up plans for another bestseller. "The whole 'tall, dark and buzzcut'-thing, that's what I don't get".

"Oh, shush your mouth, Tsunade-sama" Shizune admonished half-heartedly, reaching for young man's midriff to feel the muscles there. She just wanted to know if it was genuine, that's all. And if they were-

"No!" Tsunade slapped her apprentice's hand away sternly. "Bad Shizune! Bad! Naughty! Where's my atomiser bottle when I need it?" she muttered further when Shizune whined at her like an unfed puppy. "He's sixteen! Paedophilia, much?!"

"There's nothing wrong with looking" Shizune protested.

"Oh, isn't there? That fact that he's about twenty years younger than you doesn't make it wrong? The fact that he's jailbait doesn't make it wrong? The fact that you reduce him to nothing but an object based on his physical attractiveness doesn't make it wrong?"

"Well, when you say it like that" the mistress of poisons grudgingly begun to admit before a thought occurred to her. "Hey! Sakura-chan and Naruko-chan are also drooling over him, but they don't get scolded!" Sakura was, very much correctly, drooling and slightly damp as she idly drummed her fingers at the desk, while Naruko was having fun poking the probably brain-damaged boy in the cheek with the tip of her finger, snickering softly to herself.

"They're sixteen – they wouldn't know what to do with a man if they so were given an instruction manual and a map of his erogenous zones" she looked for the longest time at the last Uzumaki heiress, who lifted her head at her and cocked it to the side in bewilderment at the attention. "You obviously have some… stuff going on. Is it some sort of badly worded PMS or hysteria metaphor, or…?"

"Ero-sennin had the idea of doing this 'nature release' training to improve the Rasengan or something, and he handed me a paper, said it was supposed to be cut or crumble or-" she began readily to explain the whole situation.

"Chakra sensitive paper; yeah, we get it" Tsunade waved her on. "What happened then?"

"Well, I channelled chakra into it like he told me to but for the longest time it didn't do anything. Then, all of the sudden, woosh!" she threw her arms wide, knocking the notepad out of the hands of her perverted teacher, who grumbled and dived after it without as much as a pause for breath as if he was used to that happening by now. "It's goes up in a flash of light and smoke! My entire face got plastered with soot! Turns out it got Raiton and Dōton all at the same time. I've got 'hashtag that power', ya know?"

"'#DatPower'?" Tsunade wondered, to which Naruko exclaimed in triumph.

"Hah! I made you say it! #SlyFox, #Rokudaime, #NarukoFTW!"

"Huh?" Tsunade wondered at her assistant, who rolled her eyes promptly.

"It's a social media thing. You know, the reason why young people have phones? You should really get a profile on LeafNet – Naruko-chan is quite the avid and prolific user!"

"You gotta start building your powerbase somewhere, right?" Naruko added gleefully. "Anyway, so that's how we discovered that I had this 'Bakuton' thing-attebayo. Ero-sennin didn't know what the hell to do at first, ya know? He was looking up and down my family tree, went around all over the country, did these deep examinations of my chakra-"

"Which means I put a couple of seals on her and examined how her chakra reacted to them" said sage cleared his throat pointedly from aside, looking briefly up from his notebook. "It was nothing dirty, you all should know. No matter how glibly the brat phrases it".

"Maybe the heroine has a dark past" Naruko suggested out of the blue, to which the author's eyes shot open, his mouth began to salivate in earnest and his pen almost began to glow so fast he was noting things down in his little pad. "That should keep him busy for about another hour or so. As I was about to say, he found jack dosh. Nada. Shilch. So he came up with the idea of teaching me some sage stuff in order to stabilise my chakra, because whenever I use it" she made an exaggerated explosion motion. "That didn't work either. By now I can basically point at a direction and make something explode… but usually not the thing I meant to explode. It's either too weak or too strong or too general or too narrow or doesn't work at all – and that's after almost a year of training!"

"What's the problem?" Tsunade wondered as the girl paused to catch her breath.

"It's just too… unstable, if that makes any sense? As soon as I try to shape it or move it – kaboom!" Her serious tone was undercut by Kakashi, who was standing to the side and had begun to softly giggle. "What's up, Kakashi-sensei?"

"You're literally a blonde bombshell!" he tittered like a school girl who had just said a dirty word for the first time.

"Hah!" Jiraiya remarked absently. "Good one!"

"Ha ha, very funny, sensei" Naruko rolled her eyes at her former teacher. "It's not like that's the most obvious bloody joke in the history of anything!"

"Since when did you become so sarcastic?" Sakura asked of her friend and teammate, to wit she got only a shrug in reply. "Oh" she looked down as Hinata began to stir. "He's waking up!" And true to her word it was so, for the Hyūga heir blinked awake, his head feeling like he had been stuck inside the main bass drum during a rock concert. Slowly he drifted awake, his vision swimming and a thousand clocks ringing in his ears as he blinked to find a plated ceiling above him.

"Wha?" he wondered, dazed and cofused, and moved his head to the right – to find his vision filled by a most spectacular bosom clad in a black crop-top leaning towards him. The black fabric, rough and harshly cut as if modified from some larger garment, was framed with perfectly tan skin both above and below, even though below it seemed to be disturbed by some covering steel-mesh net under armour. It was, in fact, as that bosom gently swayed with her breathing and the two heavy breasts moved within the top just slightly out of sync with each other, one of the most spectacular sights he had ever seen. He wondered if that blast from before had actually killed him and he had been sent to paradise.

"With the way your body has been changing this was inevitable" Tsunade spoke with pity and laid an arm around Naruko's shoulder, who was staring down at the Hyūga boy with an indignant blush as Hinata in turn had fixed his eyes on her chest, a small trickle of drool running down his lips. "Believe me, I've been there with you. Now, there are a few things you could do – though I prefer to just make them stop their leering with surgically applied violence".

"No, he's hurt enough" Naruko replied with a hitch in her voice as Hinata drooled further over the sight of her chest. "Maybe" her uncomfortable blush was suddenly replaced with a trickster grin "maybe…" And then she sprung into action.

"Wha?!" Hinata exclaimed in protest as that heavenly bosom seemed to move, and was about to curse the no doubt nearby god who had taken it away, before he felt like his head, dizzy and full of cotton and pain as it felt, was lifted up to be laid against something soft and yet sort of springy. It yielded beneath his head, soothing and warm and oh so pleasurable, and he sighed in contentment and looked upwards to find a hand laid upon his brow and a pair of sparkling blue eyes beyond. Wait, Naruko-chan? Then his head was resting on her – on her – on-! _Must not faint, must not faint, must not faint_!

"Daishobu, Hinata-kun?" she wondered in a voice sugar sweet while her hand stroked his dust-streaked brow until it was clear and as pale as always in a soothing motion. "My technique got sort of out of hand-attebayo. I really did not mean to hurt you". Her voice dropped several octaves as she spoke quietly at his ear only for him. "I'd do anything to make it up to you".

Was she – was she suggesting -?! _Must not faint, must not faint, must not faint_! But – ah! No! Yes! Oh, Gods yes! Ahh! _Must not faint, must not faint, must not faint_! Nope – no chance, _lights out_.

"And he fainted" Kakashi noted from aside, edging away from his former student to the side of the perverted sage. "Is she learning to weaponize her sexuality?"

"Ancestors help us all" Jiraiya spoke balefully, his face paling as he saw the boy slump unconscious to the table top while Naruko looked on a little mischievously as she removed herself from the boy.

"That'll teach him" she muttered with a nod to herself.

"Will it, really?" Tsunade shook her head disapprovingly. "Sex-positive actions only serve to reinforce to notion of yourself as overtly sexualised. If you want to empower yourself, a swift boff across the bonce is a much better way".

"Are you two saying that violence and sex are the only ways a woman can be empowered?" Sakura wondered, drawing the attention of both the blondes. "That's more than just a little disturbing on its own, not to mention quite fucked up".

"We can debate feminism later in the chapter- I mean later today" Tsunade hastily corrected herself and looked around. "I will need to get some carpenters and masons in here – or alternatively that Mokuton fellow with the stupid faceguard – and Naruko-chan-"

"Yes, mommy?" the blonde girl drawled, electing a blush from the older woman.

"Y-you, ehm, should get reacquainted with the village while I try to figure out what the hell to do with you. Meet me at Training Ground 15 around six o'clock – and I expect all of y'all to be there!" she looked sternly around the table, to which the young girl that was the primary recipient of her little speech nodded eagerly. "Kakashi… I'll put some healing on this lad, but then you take him back to his apartment, alright? Put him in his bed and tuck him in nice and tight because he needs plenty of bed rest after this".

"Yes, ma'am" he nodded and stopped just short of saluting while Tsunade laid a hand glowing with chakra at the young fainted man's brow, electing a few unconscious twitches of his body before she was done. Once set Kakashi hoisted Hinata over his shoulder like a bag of spuds, just like Tsunade had done before, before he vanished in a flash as he leapt out the window.

There was little talking from that point on as Tsunade summoned her guards and set about barking order like a drill sargent that had been morphed into a Saint Bernard's against their will, leaving Shizune to converse with the perverted sage as he kept drawing up designs for character outfits and Naruko and Sakura to do whatever they wanted to for another three hours.

So naturally, they went to say hi to their friends – but not before Naruko noticed something shining of brass in the rubble of the hallway beyond the Hokage's office. So she picked it up and brushed the dust off it, marvelling at the craftsmanship of it.

 _Hm_ , she thought as she slung the sword and scabbard dropped by Hinata over her shoulder, _this thing is kind of cool_.

* * *

"So then I said to him-" Ino made exaggerated motions with her hands to emphasise what she was saying to the others as they were walking down the streets of Konoha, drawing few looks even considering how strangely they were dressed. Young shinobi, and kunoichi in particular, had a penchant for dressing in strange ways, so the spot of red-white Ten-Ten next to red-dressed Sakura, purple garbed Ino and black-orange Naruko wasn't all that odd. When you lived in a shinobi village you quickly grew acclimatised to almost anything.

"Please tell me you let him down easy" Sakura pleaded with her friend, an easy smile on her lips. It was good being friends with Ino again, after the whole Sasuke-craze had blown over.

"Hah!" the Yamanaka replied in a scoff. "No, duh! I told his civilian self to go stick a marrow up his butt. I didn't even know him and he was trying to grab my behind like some sort of caveman. Ugh, disgusting".

"He did say that he loved you while he did it" Ten-Ten pointed out in an almost careful manner.

"Guys like him are bottom feeders and will do or say anything to get into a woman's trousers" Naruko informed her girlfriends as they went. "Believe me – I trained with the champion of their kind".

"Jiraiya-sama didn't do anything weird to you, right?" Sakura wondered as they turned a corner and headed for the training grounds at the edge of town. "I mean, he's pretty perverted, so to speak-"

"I got the feeling he considers me more of a granddaughter than a woman" Naruko mused on that for a little while whilst the other girls wondered why she had Hinata's sword on her back. "Which is great, because otherwise it would have been… weird, not to mention extremely uncomfortable. But other than using me as a reason to follow along into the women's baths at the onsen and have a peep-eroo, nothing perverted, no".

"Did he ever mention if he and Tsunade-sama ever-?" Ino began to ask.

"Ino-pig! What the hell?! Don't ask things like that about the Hokage!" Sakura protested that question loudly.

"What? I'm just asking. We've all been wondering if he used to stick it to her or not-"

"Do you have to be so uncouth about it?" Sakura complained further. "At least say 'make love'-"

"No, I think 'sticking it' it precisely what Jiraiya-sama does" she said, but despite her bold words she too was blushing. None of them had any experience of the carnal ways, especially when it came to the opposite sex and so their empty tittering was just that – empty.

"I don't think so" Naruko thought long and hard on the matter. "But… I don't think it matters. Maybe she's the only one who's ever turned him down – but regarding how many times he gets powerbombed on a daily basis I doubt it's something as cliché as that. Maybe she's the only woman he's ever loved for real, or maybe it's just games and he sees her like a sister".

"It that's what he does to his sisters, then ehw" Ten-Ten added from aside, to which the other young women concurred. "Could we please talk about something else that's less… disturbing?"

"So there's Naruko-chan, Hokage-sama and myself" Ino began counting on her fingers. "Komachi-san – an ANBU I think works in the demolition's unit – and Futaba-chan in Konohamaru-kun's class. That traitor Hakui who left the village five years ago-"

"Are you seriously listing all the blondes in Konoha?" Sakura wondered at her childhood friend.

"Well, yeah" came the immediate response. "And there's that chick with the glasses who works in the archives, and Namikaze Shida… you know, the one that works for the astronomy division, the one with the heart-shaped hairdo?"

"Not to mention your father and Sakura's mom" Ten-Ten provided from the side, helping Ino with adding another two to the count.

"Aren't you forgetting the big one?" Sakura wondered, to which the others stared blankly at her. "Look!" she stretched out her arm and pointed to the face carved into the rock of the distant Hokage Mountain between her master's and the Sandaime's. "Yondaime was blonde too, right?"

"I nearly forgot" Ino slapped herself over the forehead. "It's so hard to remember that Yondaime was an actual person sometimes, you know? He did all of that crazy stuff and then died so young. I can't picture him drinking sake or buying groceries or having a wife and kids. I just can't I try to imagine it but no" she waved in front of her eyes as if to simulate cluelessness "my mind's blank". ¨

"He was probably one of those career-type people, like Kakashi-sensei" Naruko suggested. "I mean, the guy's totally my idol, but he didn't have time for a family, I think. Probably too focused on his awesome job to even consider dating". None of them knew, of course, how tragic that pronouncement actually was. "Speaking of dating-"

"I thought you said you didn't need a boyfried" Sakura wondered immediately.

"I don't" Naruko blushed. "It's not like that, okay? I'm just curious and all" she defended almost frantically "so… does Hinata-kun have a girlfriend?" By thinking of the way he had been leering at her earlier she wondered if she was supposed to tell someone or if he was going back on his promise of fidelity to some poor girl. It was fun teasing him and all, but…

"What? Not you too!" Ten-Ten protested. "Don't tell me you've got the hots for him!"

"Well, he's kind of cute" she admitted reluctantly. "But that doesn't mean I'm going to go on a shopping spree at Meishō's Secret and find the sluttiest knickers-brassiere combo they have in orange" she pointed out. "Just because I-"

"You know, I thought you were batting for the other team for the longest while" Ino remarked and interrupted her friend.

"'Batting for the other team'?" Naruko wondered, often refusing to follow metaphors. "Whaddya mean?"

"You know" Ino wiggled her eyebrows suggestively "you being an 'agent of imperialism'".

"Interested in wheelbarrows" Ten-Ten provided glibly.

"You always were a tomboy, so we did suspect you were a skirt-lifter as well" Sakura seemed to clarify.

"A West End Thesbian Warm Sister who drives a three wheeled bike" Ino provided with a grin.

"A vaginator that's on the other buss, as it were" Ten-Ten suggested further.

"Wait!" Naruko looked at each of them in turn. "I understand Sakura thinking I was gay – because that's what you're all saying, right? – but all of you?! I mean, what the hell, guys?!"

"Not that there would've been anything wrong with you if you were" Ten-Ten hurried to say. "Just… you were always asking Sakura-chan on dates and didn't seem even the slightest interest in Sasuke-kun-"

"Even though you were his first kiss!" Ino pushed her way into the conversation once again, to which Naruko went softly green in the face. "What?"

"I'd rather not be reminded of that, thank you very much" she muttered darkly and tried to get back to the original subject matter before her good mood was ruined. "For the last time: I'm not gay! So: does Hinata-kun have a girlfriend?"

"Don't even go there" Ten-Ten pouted glumly as they approached training ground 15, an open earthen field lined with stone fences and rocks of varying size that was usually set aside for practice with explosive kunai. "He's a dick".

"She's just bitter because he turned her down after she confessed to him" Ino provided cheekily grinning while Sakura waved to the small gathering of Tsunade, Jiraiya, Kakashi and Shizune who were waiting in the middle of the field. "And if anyone's gay, it's him".

"He's sixteen and has never even showed interest in a girl" Sakura clarified from aside. "And no guy ever pays that much attention to his appearance-"

"Could you kids stop talking about damn boyzone for one bloody second?!" The roar went that interrupted their talking, finding them face to face with an annoyed Hokage. "And you're supposed to be kunoichi?!"

"Isn't this supposed to be a more feminist piece of FanFiction?" Shizune turned to Jiraiya, who was happily but idly sketching on his next bestseller to the side and not looking like he gave much worry about anything. "All they've done so far is talk about boys. This certainly wouldn't pass the Bechtel-test".

"Well, maybe it needs to hit its stride before it starts preaching" the frog hermit shrugged and replied in the same low tone as the Hokage's aide. "And besides, they're young and pretty new at this. Teenagers aren't generally bastions of progressiveness, are they?"

"Fair point" Shizune nodded in soft agreement as the Hokage inquired in a loud voice what all the "hangers on" were doing there with Naruko.

"Come on, ma" she whined and threw her arms over Ten-Ten's and Ino's shoulders, pouting playfully. "They're my girls! I gotta be allowed to bring my girls, right?"

"It's their own fault if they get themselves blown up" the Hokage grumbled back and gestured rudely for Naruko to sepperate from the group and take position in the exact centre of the field, facing away from the group as if to show her what she had. "Now: do your techniques!"

"Jutsu?" Naruko wondered with a cocked head, and Tsunade looked with ever growing annoyance at the now sighing Jiraiya.

"We haven't actually gotten far enough for actual techniques, Tsunade-chan" he supplied carefully, knowing that he was treading on thin ice around his old teammate. "All she has to do to make things blow up is barely think about reaching for _that_ chakra, and then…" he shook his head, put away is notebook and looked to his apprentice. "Show them, wouldn't ya, Naruko-chan?"

"Yosh!" she nodded before she turned towards the north, away from the group now safely behind her, and stretched out her hands before her. Within seconds small popping sounds were emitting from her fingertips as smoke sizzled and drifted up from them in fine strands smelling of sulphur that were soon dispersed by the fresh spring wind that moved the air. It came in sputters, hisses and snaps, and then a series of loud bangs followed until Jiraiya told her to stop.

"We've tried everything I could think of" he told Tsunade and her now frowning face, her expression equal parts pensiveness and worry. "But as soon as she tries to move it or mould it her chakra explodes. Training her to separate lightning chakra from earth chakra leads nowhere since, ya know, kaboom, and it reacts… poorly to seals as well. As ashamed as I am to admit it, I've got no clue as what to do next".

"Kakashi-san" Tsunade turned to the white-haired pervert who was standing quietly busy reading the latest entry to the Icha Icha series. "You've any ideas as what to do with this? You are our resident Ninjutsu expert, after all".

Kakashi nodded seriously, snapped his book shut, turned to his old student and got to work. For hours he had her go through exercises, motions and moves that seemed to be of no semblance of logical use in any respect, and every time she took a stance or practiced a small technique he would ask her how she felt as well as observe her every change no matter how slight. As he worked and stood as spectator at every angle his good eye was narrowed in the light of the day, his headband at times pulled up to reveal a crimson Sharingan swirling furiously around in his other, seldom seen eye as he observed her chakra flows in greater detail. Jiraiya, who was watching absently from the proverbial stands, was a little impressed by the way Minato-kun's sole surviving student got down to the essentials of Ninjutsu practice, and since he himself had no idea as what to further do another set of eyes on the matter could not hurt, could it.

And so the hours wore on until the sky was darkening on the distant horizon with the onset of dusk and Kakashi finally nodded and let a now sweaty and severely frustrated Naruko let up with the seemingly pointless motions and exercises. "Report" his Hokage told him, and like a good little soldier he proceeded to do just that.

"Her chakra is, for lack of a better term, unstable, Hokage-sama. Explosive and highly reactive, like glyceryl trinitrate – Nitroglycerine. And so I suspect she must learn to use her chakra not through conventional techniques but through less subtle manners of directing it".

"Hmph" Jiraiya grumbled quietly. "Didn't even consider that. Stupid sexy Kakashi".

"'Fresh eyes' and everything, pervert" Tsunade admonished as if automatically before she turned back to Kakashi. "So you suggest…?"

"That she goes about it another way; her own way, since no one in this village has any idea of how to teach her" he supplied. "Other than that perhaps it is better to treat her chakra just like Nitroglycerine. It might become more stable if you allow it to soak into a grounding stabilizer of an element. Perhaps a sulphuric clay or alkalescent liquid or even a reactionary gas or silicate-potassium dust".

"Your point is that we need either material or lots of time, and both require more training?" Tsunade clarified as she rubbed her eyes in frustration and then pinched the bridge of her nose. "You know this is pretty disappointing. I thought with the technique from before I would get to see stuff blown up-"

"Well, I'm still trying out techniques and stuff" Naruko scratched the back of her head with an almost sheepish grin gracing her face, a blossom of slight red in her whiskered cheeks making her look absolutely adorable in the eyes of the adult onlookers. "Sorry if I fooled y'all. _Gomene_. But in my defence, _Shakkahō_ sounds pretty damn awesome".

"Then save it for an actual technique later on, baby girl" Tsunade told her in an almost motherly tone of voice as she held out a hand for the young woman to take. "Come now. Let's go home".

"Can that wait a while?" Naruko inquired as she reached up to finger the hilt of the sword that was slung over her shoulders. "I kinda got something I need to get back to someone-attebayo".

* * *

There was a ringing in his ears when Hinata woke up.

There were two kinds of it: one was a constant tune, a high pitch ringing dully in his inner ears, something that faded into the background noise of the world when he wasn't focused on it but rushed to the forefront whenever he thought of it and then just would not go away until his concentration fell elsewhere. The other kind of ringing came at irregular intervals in a melodious sequence, almost like someone was ringing his –

He shot up in his bed, clutching his hurting head and wondering where his clothes had gone and how he had gotten home from the exploded Hokage's office. That ringing… it was his doorbell, not the sound of his brains recovering from being turned to mush. Wearing nothing but his pants he staggered, bleary-eyed and out of focus and nearly without a single coherent thought in his head he staggered his way through his apartment and took a firm handle on the soon unlocked entrance.

He flung wide the door – and his worst horrors came to life.

"Good morning, stud-muffin-kun" she beamed at him with a smile before her eyes shot wide as she saw him stand before her in nothing but his pants. "If you greet everyone at the door like this" she noted gleefully "you're gonna get a reputation, mate".

"N-Naruko-chan!" he managed to stammer out even as he prayed to the ancestor spirits to make him melt through the floor right then and there. "H-h-hi!" He shot a look down towards his all but bare body and, in a hurried panic, clutched his hands before his boxer-clad crotch, wondering what the hell had overcome him. He had obviously not been thinking before when he went to answer the door in nothing but his underwear, and now he had to pay the piper.

"Well, that's answers the question of boxers or briefs somewhat drastically, I would say" she went on, grinning as he blushed so hard he was nearly actually navy blue in the face. Despite her apparent tendency towards schadenfreude when it came to him he still thought she looked like an angel out of heaven, even considering the fact that she was a little sweaty, rebellious strands of blonde hair plastered against her brow, and that the swiftly falling darkness outside did nothing to enhance her complexion. "May I come in?"

Ah?! She, inside his apartment?! He had to be dreaming, because such a reality was both too good and too horrible to even contemplate. "S-sure" he managed to stammer out through that accursed blockage of a brick in his mouth that was called a tongue as he stepped to the side, showing her in without a gesture of any sort. His place was clean enough, for he liked to keep things neat, tidy and organised carefully, and so as soon as he closed the door after her he hurried towards his dresser. "Mind if I g-get dressed?"

"Go right on ahead" she shrugged while taking a long look at his posterior as he was turned away. "I had to ask a whole bunch of people for directions before I actually found out you lived here. Ya know" she then went as she looked around the room "my old flat is in this building too. One floor up, three doors down and exactly mirror-inverted so it was. I wonder who lives there now".

"Some guy who owns a cabbage stand" Hinata said as he pulled on a pair of grey sweatpants and a huge black hoodie with the Konoha swirl on the back in red that hung so loose on his body that he didn't even bother zipping it up more than half-way in his customary fashion when he was just bumbling around the flat. "H-he says he's from Kaze no Kuni, says that he quite enjoys the weather here".

"Right" she shrugged a little morosely before she remembered what she had come there for. "Yeah! Kakashi-sensei didn't remember to bring your sword or whatever after the whole explosion thing, so I brought it" she unslung the sword from around her shoulders, baldric and all, and handed it to the young man who accepted it with a bow and a formal gesture of gratitude. "No need to be so formal-attebayo. I mean, it looks pretty fancy, so I thought you might want it back".

"T-thank you never the less, Naruko-chan" he bowed again as swallowed hard. "Would you like a c-cup of tea? Can I offer you anything?"

"I could go for a cuppa" she smiled back to him, and he blushed in return for a moment before he turned towards the kitchenette at the rear of the flat and set the kettle on the boil while Naruko looked around the flat. "So… where'dya get the sword?" she looked over the book shelves that stood assembled next to the bed of the bedroom area of the studio flat, many being books on acupuncture, swordwork, fencing and even poetry and flower pressing.

"A-Asuma-sensei and Shikamaru-san got it for me" Hinata had his back turned to the young woman and thus did not see her inspection of his belongings. "Asuma-sensei h-has quite a few weapons like these laying around" he adjusted the hilt of the blade that was now slung over his shoulder in a manner he found most comforting. "He says he likes to keep the weapons of the powerful people he's beaten-"

"Like Lee-kun and the martial arts school signs he got plastered all over his walls?" Naruko wondered as she let her eyes flow down from the bookshelves to find something a little out of place at the foot of it – a corner of a magazine, barely seen, jutting out from under it. "What kind of sword is it, anyway?"

"A yanmadao, a goose-quill sabre" Hinata said as he rummaged around in his cupboards looking for the chocolate biscuits he knew he had bought just the other day. "It's a weapon that more common further west, in the lands beyond Tsuchi and Kaze no Kuni. It's like a dao, a heavy sabre, but more slender and less bulky making it more suited for thrusting and piercing blows like a straight sword. Since the jian, the slender straight sword from the same region, is the customary weapon of the Hyūga main family, and the dao is better suited to the Gōken, I got a hybrid of the two – just like my new fighting style". He arranged a few cups on a tray and laid the biscuits out on a plate along with them as he babbled and began to pour up tea until he stopped. Naruko wasn't saying anything at all, not making any attempts to interrupt him or change to topic to something more fun as he was geeking out about swords. He turned, worried that he was boring her, only to find his heart gripped by panic and his soul going cold when he saw what was in Naruko's hands.

The magazines Naruko had discovered, for there were several, no doubt hidden under the frame of the bookshelf in an attempt to make sure no one saw them, were manga of a most… explicitly pornographic nature. All of them, to a one, seemed frequently read by the weathered stapling holding them together, and all of them featured gyaru women – tan and blonde and often forward and crass, a type that had grown more popular amongst the youths of the nation over the last decade. Beyond that, she noted absently, her mind seemingly not working as it should have as she flipped through the pages, it was pretty standard for a guy his age. No netorare-fetish like the one Ero-sennin went on and on about, no weird animal stuff beyond the odd girl sometimes wearing a cat-ear headband, no raping or gang-bang stuff – just plain old vanilla sex, with anal included at times and-. She stopped at the final pages of one of the magazines and saw one of the women, after a bout of sex that was no doubt impossible in reality, laying prone on the floor with a blissful smile on a sweaty face, a single side-panel showing a stylised depiction of sperm burrowing their way into an ovulated egg in the act of conception.

Naruko shut that magazine with a heavy blush and swallowed hard. How… how was one supposed to react to the fact that one was alone in a flat with a boy who had lecherous material depicting women just like you getting impregnated? She was feeling very, _very_ uncomfortable and was internally debating whether or not to jump out the window when Hinata decided the matter for her.

"Kya!" he uttered a wordless and almost inhuman cry of shame and panicked embarrassment as he flashed through his flat, ripping the erotic manga out of her hands, clutching them to his chest as dashed towards and then out the door of his flat before he hurled them off the overpass, scattering them into the air before he hurried back inside and slammed the door shut behind him before any of the magazines had even touched the ground. Panting he was leaning his back against the door, his heart hammering harder than it ever had before, eyes closed and praying that it was all a nightmare. He slumped down, sliding down the door until he was sitting clear against the floor, his face hidden from her in his hands. He had never felt so humiliated in his life.

"So" she stated in a voice that was filled with equal parts amusement, shock and confusion "I take it you're not gay, no matter what the girls say". He groaned into his hands and wanted to cry. "Uhm… well, this is awkward".

"P-please leave" he was almost sobbing, feeling like a wrung out rag, like a plastic bag, like all he was worth was a thin shell around a whole lot of wasted space. "Just-" damn it all, he didn't want her to see him like that. Anyone but her.

"Hey" a hand gripped his wrist and baring his eyes to the light of her tender smile. Not knowing what to do she did what she always did – adopted a both encouraging and humorous countenance as she ensured him everything was going to be alright. "It's alright. Settle down. No reason to panic about a couple of porno-mags, okay?"

"I-it's so e-embarrassing" he hid his face again until her insistences made him think better of it.

"Everyone jerks it" she admonished with tender smile turning wry. "I mean, it doesn't mean anything, does it? You just feel the urge and then you either ignore it or you don't, right? Everyone gets frustrated. Me too". And now he was on the verge of fainting as that particular mental image nearly overpowered his already fragile mental state and brought his sanity to an end.

"So, em…" she went only slowly "maybe _I_ shouldn't have been the one to find your boner-kindling, but hey, it's my fault for poking around in the first place. Not my place to judge. Everyone's got their preferences, and one man's kink is another man's vanilla". Of course, it wasn't nearly as simple or easy for her to say as she made it seem, as she was merely falling back on stock phrases uttered by Ero-sennin from time to time while inside she didn't know up from down. How was one supposed to react in such a situation? "So… no worries, right?" His eyes were still misted over and his cheeks still doing their best red chilli-pepper impression, and somehow it was she who was feeling bad. "Please don't cry just because you threw away your porn".

"I-I'm sorry for being such a p-pervert" he apologised and bent his head at her in a sitting bow, causing her to wave her hands earnestly from side to side.

"Nonsense! I trained with the worst of them! You don't prance about like a ponce with a pair of used panties on your head like the world's worst power ranger, right?" He shook his head hurriedly. "And you don't peep on actual women in the bath or the onsen, right?" Again he shook his head, a little more forcefully this time. "See, none's the worry! And there wasn't any weird stuff in there, was there?" Except for, like, the fact that every single one of the women in the stories looked like her. That, in and of itself, was fucked up. _Note to self_ , she said even as she tried to cheer the young man up, _keep a look out for stalkers_. Because an obsession like that was nothing short of unhealthy.

"I'm sorry, N-Naruko-chan" he replied to all of that and took her hand when she offered to help him stand back up. In the end they drank tea together and Naruko tried to make small-talk, but after such an incident as earlier things were, understandably, awkward beyond recovery.

And so she left him half an hour later with a blushing wave and a wish of a good night's sleep to be had, not knowing that as soon she had left he started to softly bang his head against the wall beside his bed.

Naruko, in the meantime, made her way to her new home.

The Senju compound was far bigger than it feasibly needed to be, as the clan now mostly consisted of Tsunade and some few and very distantly related kin who lived in separate wings of the complex. So the Hokage, not wanting to waste space, had repurposed most of the compound into a gambling den and bar – for the sake of village morale, of course – and had moved her living area to the old guest house that was connected to the west-wing by a long walkway covered by trees on all sides. The guest house in and off itself had once been one of many built by the Shodaime in the span of a few minutes using his now legendary Kekkei Genkai. As Naruko snuck around back the gambling parlour and made her way to the front of the Senju house, a three story building of traditional stile based around a single grand room just past the entrance hall in which a konara tree grew in eternal and perpetual bloom despite weather and hardship, she considered her legacy.

It would change things, wouldn't it? Not many people in the world possessed a bloodline ability like that and it would make a world of difference around her. Not that her teachers seemed to mind it – in fact, they were strangely cool with the whole thing as far as she could tell. It was odd, really. Well, if they hadn't been, what could have happened?

Tsunade have a breakdown under the pressure of handling the fall back caused by such a new and powerful addition to not merely the fighting prowess of the village but also in the change of the political structure? Kakashi defending Naruko and her place in the village to redeem himself in his own eyes after what he perceived as a lifetime of failures and regrets? Hinata pushed into a game of power too soon as the village, under the shock of Naruko's new power emerging as a wild factor in the game of clans, tore itself apart in civil war?

Naruko snorted as she pulled off her sandals in the entry and walked towards that central rotunda room. For anything of that to happen would just have been stupid.

"I'm home!" she called out, the central chamber intersecting all the three floors of the building with stairs going circular from floor to floor in an upwards pointing spiral, all the other rooms of the building arranged around that central chamber. "Where is everyone?!"

"Yo hoo!" a call was heard as one of the sliding doors on the second floor opened and Shizune stepped out on that balcony, leaning over the oaken rail to wave down at Naruko. "Come up, will you, Naruko-chan? All your friends are here!"

"What?" Naruko asked after she had leapt up onto the balcony, ignoring the stairs like a true kunoichi, and followed Shizune into the adjoining room, a sitting room dominated by a large, unnecessarily so, television and a whole cavalcade of mismatched loveseats, armchair and one particularly distressingly green sofa on which the Hokage was sitting sloughed as three young women seemed to be bickering all around her. "You guys!" the blonde exclaimed happily.

"We thought it was alright if we came over to say 'hi' and 'welcome home'" Sakura smiled over the brim of her cup of tea from a pink and white checker-patterned armchair, Ino and Ten-Ten waving from other seats while Shizune went into an linked kitchen, bringing out with her a kettle of hot water and an entire basket full of instant ramen cups. "But you weren't here, so…"

"Sorry" Naruko apologised as she began to set about making her food with a rumbling stomach, salivating profusely as she filled up one cup of chicken-flavoured divine goodness. "I went to see Iruka-sensei first, and then I swung by Ichiraku Ramen, and then I went by Hinata-kun's place to drop off the sword Kakashi-sensei forgot earlier today. Things sort of got in the way".

"That's alright-" Ten-Ten began to say before the young woman materialised a pair of orange plastic chopsticks seemingly out of nowhere and began to hungrily gulp down noodles and broth with gusto, making sounds reminiscent of an industrial vacuum packer being swallowed by a rhinoceros.

"You're not getting any more out of her now, Ten-Ten-chan" Sakura went with a slight sigh, and so they went back to what they had been talking about before the blonde bombshell had arrived.

"As I was saying" Ino began to protest as the continuation of some argument that had been going on before "why do I and Ten-Ten have to be the support and medics in our squad? I can be just as violent as Chouji and as good on the defensive as Shikamaru, you know".

"Yeah" Ten-Ten pressed indignantly. "Why can Neji be the medic in my team? He's the one with any good chakra control since I fight with weapons and Lee's... Well, Lee. He doesn't do subtle".

"Your abilities are better on the distance, Ino-Chan" Tsunade went readily. "Broody and Chubby in your team have to be on the middle distance and mêlée-range respectively for the whole flower card trick-thing to work".

"Yeah, but think on it. Everytime there's a medic or support specialist on the teams it's unfailingly a girl, right? Sakura, me, Ten-Ten, Hinata-"

"Hinata's not a girl" Sakura protested.

"Yeah? He's the most feminine member of his team. I bet you money – actual money, Ten-Ten, I'm not letting you fool me into taking Monopoly cash again – that if Naruko-chan was a boy then Hinata-kun would've been a girl just for the sake of cosmic balance".

"Huh?" Naruko, who hadn't been listening as she was busy gorging herself on her fourth cup of instant ramen and spreading broth all over her whiskered cheeks, lifted her head and blinked.

"That relegation is because of your skills, not because of your gender-" Tsunade retorted swiftly. "That's not being sexist and saying women should get out of the fighting and into the kitchen: it's just allocating the right people to the right jobs".

"Then why is aren't we the right people for frontline fighting?" Ten-Ten pushed further. "I mean, Sakura is the most physically strong member of her team, yet she's relegated to the rear because she's not as good at fighting? We're all Shinobi. Well, Kunoichi, but same shit, different anus, right? We went through the same sort of schooling, the same sort of training as all the boys, but are we allowed to fight the same ways? No!"

"Did the teachers have any reason to teach us flower arranging in the academy?" Ino went on, thinking back on those days long ago. "Or did they just didn't bother to teach us to fight as good as the boys? And, you know… women do get paid less on average than men".

"There are fewer Kunoichi in the active military than men" Sakura suggested from the side. "I mean, maybe it's because it's a number's game? Women in the workforce haven't gotten as much exposure to the public eye as men-"

"Come on, Pinky-chan" Ten-Ten urged her friend. "It's not the Sengoku Jidai anymore. It's a new world, and just as many female cadets join the academy as male ones. A woman's Hokage, for crying out loud – and a woman's Mizukage too! This is an era of peace… well, sort of… and communication and things thought impossible before! We could have true and utter equality for everyone! It just doesn't make sense; a person shouldn't be treated differently just because they got tits".

"Or in Forehead's case, don't got any" Ino provided from aside, and from there they got swiftly off topic and things… escalated.

In the end, when Naruko had downed her eight cup of instant ramen, the conversation was dying down and the looks went no to Naruko once more as the clock struck much too late for all of their liking.

"We were thinking of having a girls' night out" Ino suggested as they stood from the cushions of the sofa and the loveseat and the armchair, looking at Naruko. "You wanna come with? We could go celebrate your homecoming with a cake and rum or something".

"Nah" the other blonde shook her head in return, electing surprise from the others. "I'm kinda sleepy-attebayo. It's been a really long day, ya know?"

"You girls go out and have fun" Tsunade looked to Shizune, silently ordering her to go along and make sure that none of them caused any trouble. "I'll stay in with Naruko, help her get unpacked and sorted. None of you stay out past… oh, who gives a tosh? Just have fun and keep yourselves unhurt, yeah?"

"Sure thing!" Ten-Ten flashed a smile and the peace symbol by making a V-gesture with her left hand. "You guys get on that, then!" Ino added with a grin and led the way out of the sitting room.

"Thank you, shishou" Sakura bowed and went along with her friends, followed by a sighing but appreciative Shizune. And after tidying up in the room a little Tsunade showed the girl around the house.

It was huge, or at least it seemed so in Naruko's eyes. It had been a guest house built as a part of a compound that had finished construction before the boundaries of the village had even been firmly established, and so no reservation had been made on space. Compared to her studio flat and the tents and hotel rooms she had used to sleep in during her apprenticeship with the perverted sage it was nothing short of enormous, with three rooms, a bathroom and lavatory as well as a small kitchen on every floor, rooms most of which had been put aside for either research or business by the ever pragmatic Hokage. One chamber, one of the smaller ones, had been readied for Naruko, though, at the very top floor, a room dominated by a large bed, a book-shelf, a space next to the room's oshīre that looked like a small walk-in closet but was actually a profunctuary armoury and a dresser for her clothes. While Tsunade settled down on the plush and alarmingly orange covers of the bed Naruko went about unsealing her travelling gear from the scrolls in the pouch on her hip.

"Kaa-san" Naruko wondered as she was unpacking her socks into one of the drawers of the dresser, her voice a little lower in pitch than usual. "Why was Hinata-kun at the office today?"

"He was doing what he does every single month" the older blonde sighed irritably as she was leaning back on the bed, staring at the ceiling of the bedroom and wondering who of her old relatives had used to live there. "He moonlights at the hospital – did you know that? Outside of his teammates and a couple of others in your old class he has basically no social life. Spends all his time training or working. And once a month he comes into my office, signs a transfer form and requests to be assigned to the ANBU. Every single time I deny it".

"Him? In the ANBU?" She wondered at that. He seemed strong enough, she supposed, but appearances could be deceiving. "Why do you keep turning him down? Isn't he good for the job?"

"Him? He's one of the most versatile Shinobi we have now that the Uchiha dick is no longer with us. No. The problem's something else entirely". Naruko turned away from her unpacking and gave her adopted mother a long look, to which the Hokage rolled her eyes. "What? You think I'm so dumb that I would send out a Hyūga of the main family into the field without any precautions? If he gets captured or killed and his Byakugan harvested by our enemies we would find ourselves deep in the shite. So no, I'm not letting him join the ANBU".

"Then just place some seals on-" Naruko began suggesting.

"You know, I asked the same thing of Hiashi" Tsunade interrupted. "He said that he wouldn't sully his son and heir's power with seals that could potentially stymie his development. He said that the lad had to be at least eighteen years of age before he could allow anything of the sort. Ugh. You know, that's a bit I hate about this job. When it's not paperwork or the old farts on the council breathing down my neck it's the clans making my supposedly awesome job a chore". As Naruko went back to unpacking the last of the great Senju regarded the young woman with differing eyes. "Why do you keep asking about him? Did something happen between you two?"

And so Naruko decided to break the implied confidentiality of the moment and reveal everything that had happened between the two to Tsunade. The older woman, not surprisingly, burst out laughing.

"What's so funny?" the younger woman pouted and sank down on her bed opposite her adopted mother. "It's weird, if nothing else! He's acting like a bit of a creep-"

"Oh, my dear baby girl!" the Hokage chuckled and took one whiskered cheek in each and, pinching them as she grinned Naruko right in the eye. "You've really no idea, have you? He's always been head-over-heels in love with you!"

"What?!" Naruko questioned in an astonished exclamation.

"It's true! The other girls are probably just trying to will reality into a different direction, but they know it too – as does everyone else who's ever seen the boy look at you. He doesn't creep on you – well, maybe he does that too – but he adores you. You're the reason why he keeps pushing himself so hard. The only reason he wants to join the ANBU is so that he came become all strong and famous so that you will notice him".

"Well, that's" Naruko muttered, not knowing what to say. It was like she had been feeling for the rest of the village all along – the desperate need for attention, to be seen – but this time she was on the receiving end of that need and she didn't know quite what to feel about it. "What should I do? I mean, I don't like him like that – not yet, anyway. He's cute and all, but-"

"You've hardly ever noticed him before he took off his frumpy sweater and showed that he had a bod you could bounce marbles off?" Tsunade questioned. "For now, there's nothing you can do about it. Now you know he likes you – loves you even – and for some people that's enough. The only thing some people want in a partner is that they love them… but not you, I suspect, and you have other things that are more important on your mind".

"What should I do, then? Act like everything is normal?" Naruko questioned.

"Trust me, the last thing he wants is for you to shun him now. He's probably all hurt, ashamed and confused right now, so acting just like before would be the best. Tease him, flirt with him – just don't try to step on his feelings, okay? He's a nice boy and wouldn't hurt a fly. And if he ever acts… inappropriate, and punching doesn't word" she laid an arm around her new daughter's shoulders as they both settled down on the bed, unpacking finished at last "you just come to me, alright? Kaa-san will take care of it".

And so Tsunade gently stroked her baby girl's hair until Naruko fell asleep, after which she got up, laid the blankets over her and left her to a dream world that was much more simple and yet infinitely more complex than the waking world.

* * *

Meanwhile, across town, Hinata was still busy banging his head against a hard surface, only now it was the wooden disk of a bar as most of his mates sat around him instead of the wall of his lonely flat.

"She made her throw out your porn?!" Kiba questioned, outraged at the very notion. "Now that was uncalled for!" He and Shino were sitting to one said of Hinata at the bar, the other flanked by Neji, Shikamaru and Chōji, Lee being the only one of the "boys" absent due to him being banned for life from all bars in Konoha due to circumstances one would best not mention in polite company.

"He obviously did it of his own accord, you troublesome prick" Shikamaru grumbled and refilled Hinata's cup of sake. Despite none of them being of legitimate legal age to consume alcohol without the express consent of their parents or in public they were Shinobi, and thus adults in the eyes of the law within the city limits of Konoha. "Don't put words in his mouth. You know how he is with words".

"This is the worst day of my life!" Hinata landed his forehead on the oaken surface of the bar with a thud, laying his arms over his head. "She hates me now! She hates me!"

"Don't take it so hard, brother" Neji said and laid an arm over his cousin's shoulders, speaking in reassuring tones. "She isn't one to hold a grudge".

"Have you met her?" Chōji wondered rethorically. "She holds grudges worse than that Uchiha prick! Doesn't she always say that-"

"You're not helping" Neji growled at the boy through bare teeth, and the Akimichi heir promptly shut his mouth and said nothing further. "See, this might be a good thing. Now she has got to understand that you at least have feelings towards her-" by the loud groan of mental anguish emitted by the young man in question the cousin figured that maybe that wasn't quite the right approach. "Shino!" he hissed, begging for help.

"If you had been emitting the right pheromones then she would've been yours already" Shino spoke levelly. "Mating is very much a response to attraction, and judging by her actions she is not attracted to you other than superficially – something I am sure she has gotten over by now".

"Ah!" Hinata cried again and banged his head against the bar once more, Neji staring daggers at the Aburame heir.

"You guys really suck at this, don't you?" wondered the bartender who was keeping the bar and odd customers who were sitting in the booths in the other parts of the little pub refreshed. Shikamaru gave the man, as he was busy wiping down and polishing a glass, a long and dirty look. "Well, I'll just take my advice where it is wanted".

"Civilian prick" Kiba muttered after the old man moved away from them and out of earshot over the lull of the music and the dull conversations around them. "Well, there's plenty of fish in the sea, as they say, mate. Maybe you should just move on-"

A black stare fixed him in his seat as Hinata turned his eyes towards him, glaring daggers from out of his pale and now emotionally deadened eyes, making an icy hand grip Kiba's heart in killing intent. "Blasphemy" the Hyūga heir said at his friend before he turned to the drink Shikamaru had poured him and downing it in one shot.

"Yup" Chōji shook his head in exaggerated pity. "He's got it for her. He's got it bad".

"What else is new?" Shikamaru wondered dully before lifting his head as a couple of new shapes made their way into the bar – a gathering of three men, two of them with hair of pale white grey and one tan man with his hair set up in a ponytail. "Looks like it's the annual gathering of the 'Naruko's Teachers' Self-congratulation Union'" he muttered and looked to his cup, finding it empty and giving a sigh. "Troublesome".

"Look!" shouted an excitable voice and Hinata suddenly found his shoulders clasped by a pair of strong, eager and terribly callused hands. "See these shoulders here! Perfect protagonist material! He's made to be on the cover of novels, mark my words!"

"J-Jiraiya-sama!" Hinata protested as he was pulled to his feet by the perverted sage to have him twirl around like a living mannequin to demonstrate things to his fellow teachers of Uzumaki Naruko. "W-what's going on?!"

"Truly, you are correct, Jiraiya-sama!" Iruka-sensei, his words slurred slightly in his own inebriation, remarked as he gestured meaningfully to the boy while talking to the other two older men. "A mark of considerable prowess – I am very proud to have taught this boy! The other boys in his class were crap!"

"Hey!" Kiba and the others protested as one – except for Shino, who himself just sunk into a silent depression.

"Well, it's true!" the Urmino teacher went on as he took the seat Hinata had been forcefully vacated from. "Shino-kun lacks personality, and Neji also needs an urgent personality infusion, like, yesterday! And the rest of you were poor students! Hinata-kun was this close" he showed an inch between his index and middle fingers which otherwise would be pinched together "this close! – to becoming rookie of the year! Great technical skills, theory: brilliant! If only he was more outward-going and sure of himself… then perhaps he wouldn't have died and this Asuma-lookalike taken his place".

"Sensei is such a mean drunk" Shikamaru drawled with a shake of the head and beckoned the bartender towards him to order another drink.

"Come on, sensei!" Kiba protested gruffly as reached for his own cup of sake. "What the hell?! I mean, I get that you dislike the Uchiha traitor, but hey! You got to admit we've grown awesome over the years! You might even say that we're Kibalicious!"

"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard" Jiraiya complained as Kakashi, exasperated over the escapades over the manchildren now in his care, approached and moved to speak to the now side-lined Hinata. "Say, Hinata-kun" Kakashi went as he took the lad aside and away from the two men he was effectively babysitting "I've a proposition for you".

"Kakashi-sensei" the young man swallowed hard and stammered back "I-I don't, ehm, do that, ehm sort of thing... No matter what you've heard from Sakura-chan".

"Not that kind of proposition, you idjit" the Sharingan genius rolled his eyes in turn at that, finding the innocence of virgin boys nothing but tedious. "So, with Naruko-chan back in the village the team is reforming, as you've no doubt guessed. We need one additional member, one with diverse skills. Naruko-chan is very much a heavy hitter, frontline, tank, face-to-foot and nuts-to-fist sort of fighter. Sakura-chan is more suited for a supporting role - which means I find myself in need of a shinobi with a particular set of skills".

"I-I-I'm sorry, Kakashi-sensei" the lad stammered back even as his cheeks went red with the implications of what was being said. "I'm already on a team with Kiba and Shino, and I've been on it for years. And with as many times I've requested transfer already but have it denied-"

"Look on your shoulder, kid" Kakashi urged and unshrugged Hinata's jacket, showing him a small swirl of a design, much like the whirlpool symbol that was on everyone's uniforms, in black against his pale skin. Slowly, as Hinata looked on, the seal faded from view, sinking into his skin until it was completely hidden from the eyes of the world. "I had a few ideas of how to draw it up, but the seal-master over there" he gestured at the man by the bar who was busy doing a silly little dance with a lampshade on his head "took one look and went righty-o. An author and an artist - he is the true genius around here".

Hinata touched his shoulder with trembling fingers, wondering if it was actually real. Was this… was this it? After all the time he had been pushing for it, had it really been that simple?

"It's quite the complicated seal that uses your own chakra to cast a small Genjutsu mirage over itself, concealing it from most forms of normal scrutiny" Kakashi explained as the man he had called a genius was making hip-thrusts while singing a song full of suggestive references to bobsledding to the applause of the entire bar. "It's a little more hard-core than the Hyūga cursed seal, though. Instead of your eyes becoming regular ones or whatever happens your eyes, along with most of your head, will literally explode if you die. So… uhm" he patted Hinata on the back. "Try not to get killed?"

"Why is that a question?" Hinata complained in a mumbled whine, slightly terrified but exhilarated all at once. "Kakashi-sensei… were you honest about your offer?"

"Do I need to spell it out for you?" the son of the White Fang smirked unseen beneath his mask. "Let's make it official, then. Hinata-kun: would you like to join Team Kakashi?"

* * *

End! Slut! _Fin_!

 **A/N:** As you've all no doubt noticed I tend to use British mannerisms while writing. Thus: the word "pants" is short for "Pantaloons", "Panties", "Underpants" or other such terms and is nearly interchangeable with "Knickers", though knickers more commonly refer to women's underwear of the slightly more… bold and forward sort, as it were. So when Hinata answers the door in his pants he's not wearing any trousers, if you get my meaning ;-)

Also: me, as myself, I've no idea what's this obsession Americans seem to have with their sexual partners being over eighteen years old. Then again age of consent in this country is fifteen, and even that's got a provision – if both parties are under fifteen and consenting, then the law's got no problem with it. Scandinavia, huh? Such a fantastic region in the world.

Anyway, one trope that is common in pornography, and especially so in hentai, is that when a person of the opposite gender finds a person's stash of erotica the result is almost always sex in form or another; as if uncovering such a thing makes you obligated – obligated, no less! – to compensate that person with a game of "Hide the Salami". This is dumb. Really, really dumb and very much against what actually happens in such situations: awkwardness.

Just me trying to double down on some things I find distressing in the world, ya know?

So, cheeio for now! Read and review, and DFTBA!


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